Malleability of Preferences for Honesty

Johannes Abeler, Armin Falk and Fabian Kosse ()
Additional contact information
Fabian Kosse: LMU Munich

No 2021-021, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: Reporting private information is a key part of economic decision making. A recent literature has found that many people have a preference for honest reporting, contrary to usual economic assumptions. In this paper, we investigate whether preferences for honesty are malleable and what determines them. We experimentally measure preferences for honesty in a sample of children. As our main result, we provide causal evidence on the effect of the social environment by randomly enrolling children in a year-long mentoring programme. We find that, about four years after the end of the programme, mentored children are significantly more honest.

Keywords: honesty; lying; truth-telling; Formation of preferences; experiments with children (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D64 D82 D90 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
Note: IP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Abeler ... ferences-honesty.pdf First version, April 12, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Malleability of Preferences for Honesty (2021)
Working Paper: Malleability of preferences for honesty (2021)
Working Paper: Malleability of Preferences for Honesty (2021)
Working Paper: Malleability of Preferences for Honesty (2021)
Working Paper: Malleability of Preferences for Honesty (2021)
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:hka:wpaper:2021-021

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().