Lying about Delegation

Angela Sutan and Radu Vranceanu

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper reports results from a three-player variant of the ultimatum game in which the Proposer can delegate to a third party his decision regarding how to share his endowment with a Responder with a standard veto right. However, the Responder cannot verify whether the delegation is effective or the third party merely plays a "scapegoat" role while the decision is made by the Proposer himself. In this imperfect information setting, the Proposer can send an unverifiable message declaring his delegation strategy. The most interesting strategy is "false delegation", in which the Proposer makes the decision but claims to have delegated it. In our sample, the recourse to false delegation is significant, and a significant number of potential Delegates accept serving in the scapegoat role. However, there are many honest Proposers, and 20% of all Delegates will refuse to be the accomplices of a dishonest Proposer. Responders tend to more readily accept poor offers in a setup that permits lying about delegation; the acceptance rate of the poor offer is the highest when Delegates can refuse the scapegoat role.

Keywords: delegation of responsibility; lies; communications strategy; ultimatum game; dishonesty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://essec.hal.science/hal-01109345v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Lying about delegation (2016)
Working Paper: Lying about Delegation (2015)
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