Lying and Shirking Under Oath

Nicolas Jacquemet (), Alexander James, Stéphane Luchini, James Murphy and Jason Shogren

No 2019-02, Working Papers from University of Alaska Anchorage, Department of Economics

Abstract: This study explores whether an oath to honesty can reduce both shirking and lying among crowd-sourced internet workers. Using a classic coin-flip experiment, we first show that a substantial majority of Mechanical Turk workers both shirk and lie when reporting the number of heads flipped. We then demonstrate lying can be reduced by first asking each worker to swear voluntarily on his or her honor to tell the truth in subsequent economic decisions. The oath, however, did not reduce shirking as measured by time-at-coin-flip-task, although it did increase the time they spent answering a demographic survey. Conditional on response, MTurk shirkers and liars were less likely to agree to an ex post honesty oath. Our results suggest oaths may help elicit more truthful behavior in on-line crowd-sourced environments.

Keywords: experimental economics; Honesty; Intrinsic Costs; Field Experiment; Solemn Oath; Mechanical Turk; MTurk; lying; shirking; labor economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C90 C93 D01 D82 J20 J30 J40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-08
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 (1)

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Working Paper: Lying and Shirking Under Oath (2019)
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