Monetary incentives and the contagion of unethical behavior

Benoît Le Maux (), David Masclet () and Sarah Necker ()
Additional contact information
Benoît Le Maux: University of Rennes
David Masclet: University of Rennes
Sarah Necker: Ludwig Erhard ifo Center for Social Market Economy and Institutional Economics

Journal of the Economic Science Association, 2024, vol. 10, issue 2, No 3, 213-231

Abstract: Abstract We examine how monetary incentives and information about others’ dishonesty affect lying decisions and whether these two dimensions interact with each other. Our experiment consists of a repeated cheating game where we vary the monetary incentives (Low, High, and Very High) and information about others’ dishonesty (With or Without information). We find that dishonesty decreases when payoffs are Very High. Information has only a weak positive effect on average. Conditioning on beliefs, we find that those who overestimate (underestimate) cheating reduce (increase) dishonesty. Information and payoffs do not interact with each other.

Keywords: Laboratory experiment; Cheating; Monetary incentives; Information; Lying cost (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40881-024-00175-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jesaex:v:10:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s40881-024-00175-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/40881

DOI: 10.1007/s40881-024-00175-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Economic Science Association is currently edited by Nikos Nikiforakis and Robert Slonim

More articles in Journal of the Economic Science Association from Springer, Economic Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().