 Lying in competitive environments: Identifying behavioral impactsSimon Dato, Eberhard Feess and Petra Nieken European Economic Review, 2024, vol. 170, issue C Abstract: Incentive schemes based on relative performance provide high effort incentives, but may backfire by increasing incentives for misconduct. Previous literature supports this view by demonstrating that, as compared to individual incentive schemes based on absolute performance only, highly competitive environments are associated with higher degrees of lying and cheating. However, it is not clear if this is (mainly) driven by stronger financial incentives or by competition per se and its behavioral effects. We conduct an online experiment with competitive and individual incentive schemes in which the financial incentives to lie are held constant. From a behavioral perspective, a competitive environment may increase the willingness for misconduct via a desire-to-win, but may also decrease it via the negative payoff externality on competitors. Our results provide evidence of a significant lying-enhancing desire-to-win-effect and an insignificant lying-reducing negative externality effect. Keywords: Private information; Lying; Contest; Competition; Cheating (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:170:y:2024:i:c:s0014292124001739 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2024.104844 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
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