Malleability of Preferences for Honesty

Johannes Abeler, Armin Falk and Fabian Kosse ()
Additional contact information
Fabian Kosse: University of Würzburg

No 14304, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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: formation of preferences; truth-telling; lying; honesty; experiments with children (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D64 D82 D90 H26 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2021-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published online in: Economic Journal , 22 May 2024

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14304.pdf (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:iza:izadps:dp14304

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().