Comment on "Promises and Partnership"

Cary Deck (), Maroš Servátka and Steven Tucker

Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance

Abstract: Charness and Dufwenberg (2006) find that promises increase cooperation and suggest that the behavior of subjects in their experiment is driven by guilt aversion. By modifying the procedures to include a double blind social distance protocol we test an alternative explanation that promise keeping was due to external influence and reputational concerns. Our data are statistically indistinguishable from those of Charness and Dufwenberg and therefore provide strong evidence that their observed effects regarding the impact of communication are due to internal factors and not due to an outside bystander.

Keywords: Experiment; promises; partnership; guilt aversion; psychological game theory; trust; lies; social distance; behavioral economics; hidden action (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2011-04-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.canterbury.ac.nz/cbt/econwp/1114.pdf (application/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:cbt:econwp:11/14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Albert Yee ().