Truth and trust in communication: experiments on the effect of a competitive context

Julian Rode

No 08-04, Papers from Sonderforschungsbreich 504

Abstract: The paper employs laboratory experimentation to study the effect of competition on truth telling and trust in communication. A sequence of either competitive or cooperative interactions preceded an experimental communication game. In the game, informed advisors sent a recommendation to decision-makers who faced uncertainty about the consequences of their choice. While many advisors told the truth against their monetary self-interest, the propensity to tell the truth was unaffected by the contextual priming. In contrast, decision-makers trusted significantly less in a competitive context. The effect was strongest when they faced full uncertainty. The paper relates this result to psychological and neuro-economic findings on automatic information processing. The data of this study were largely in line with Subjective Equilibrium Analysis (Kalai and Lehrer, 1995).

Keywords: experimental economics; truth telling; trust; asymmetric information; context effects; competition; automatic information processing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D8 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/2307/1/dp08_04.pdf

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:mnh:spaper:2307

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from Sonderforschungsbreich 504 Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Katharina Rautenberg ().