Context-dependent cheating: Experimental evidence from 16 countries

Juan-Camilo Cardenas, David Pascual-Ezama (), Toke R. Fosgaard () and Praveen Kujal

No 12611, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.

Keywords: Honesty; corruption; cultural differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D01 D73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 2015-03-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

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https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/8557/dcede2015-12.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Context-dependent cheating: Experimental evidence from 16 countries (2015)
Working Paper: Context dependent cheating: Experimental evidence from 16 countries (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:012611

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