Who never tells a lie?

Vanberg, Christoph

Who never tells a lie?

Experimental Economics, 2017, vol. 20, issue 2, No 7, 448-459

Abstract: Abstract I experimentally investigate the hypothesis that many people avoid lying even in a situation where doing so would result in a Pareto improvement. Replicating (Erat and Gneezy, Management Science 58, 723–733, 2012), I find that a significant fraction of subjects tell the truth in a sender-receiver game where both subjects earn a higher payoff when the partner makes an incorrect guess regarding the roll of a die. However, a non-incentivized questionnaire indicates that the vast majority of these subjects expected their partner not to follow their message. I conduct two new experiments explicitly designed to test for a ‘pure’ aversion to lying, and find no evidence for the existence of such a motivation. I discuss the implications of the findings for moral behavior and rule following more generally.

Keywords: Lying; Deception; Morality; Ethics; Experiments; C91; D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Working Paper: Who never tells a lie? (2015)
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DOI: 10.1007/s10683-016-9491-2

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