Context dependent cheating: Experimental evidence from 16 countries

David Pascual-Ezama, Toke R. Fosgaard, Juan-Camilo Cardenas, Praveen Kujal, Róbert Veszteg, Beatriz Gil-Gómez de Liaño, Brian Gunia, Doris Weichselbaumer, Katharina Hilken (), Armenak Antinyan, Joyce Delnoij, Antonios Proestakis, Michael D. Tira, Yulius Pratomo, Tarek Jaber-López and Pablo Brañas-Garza

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Economic loss to society due to dishonesty can be quite large. Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across sixteen countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries and not of the national institutions. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. The experiment was conducted in 16 countries with 1440 participants. Despite the clear incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.

Keywords: Honesty; corruption; cultural differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Context-dependent cheating: Experimental evidence from 16 countries (2015)
Working Paper: Context-dependent cheating: Experimental evidence from 16 countries (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:60629

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