HONEST ON MONDAYS: HONESTY AND THE TEMPORAL DISTANCE BETWEEN DECISIONS AND PAYOFFS

Bradley Ruffle and Yossef Tobol
Additional contact information
Yossef Tobol: School of Industrial Management Jerusalem College of Technology Jerusalem Israel and IZA, Bonn

No 1301, Working Papers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics

Abstract: We show that temporally distancing the decision task from the payment of the reward increases honest behavior. Each of 427 Israeli soldiers fulfilling their mandatory military service rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome to the unit's cadet coordinator. For every point reported, the soldier received an additional half-hour early release from the army base on Thursday afternoon. Soldiers who participated on Sunday (the first work day of the week) are significantly more honest than those who participated later in the week. We derive practical implications for eliciting honesty.

Keywords: experimental economics; honesty; temporal distance; soldiers. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/humsos/Econ/Workingpapers/1301.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Honest on Mondays: Honesty and the Temporal Distance between Decisions and Payoffs (2013)
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:bgu:wpaper:1301

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aamer Abu-Qarn ().