Screening for Honesty

Bradley Ruffle and Yossef Tobol ()
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Yossef Tobol: Jerusalem College of Technology (JTC)

No 8286, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We report the results of a field experiment on honesty conducted on 427 Israeli soldiers fulfilling their mandatory military service. Each soldier rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome to the unit's cadet coordinator. For every point reported, the soldier received an additional half hour early release from the army base on Thursday afternoon. We find that the higher a soldier's military entrance score, the more honest he is on average. Moreover, to the extent that honesty is a valued trait, regression discontinuity analysis reveals that the Israeli military has optimally set the threshold score to qualify to be an officer. Our results bear important implications for the design of screening tests that evaluate employee honesty.

Keywords: experimental methods; honesty; personnel selection; soldiers; high non-monetary stakes; regression discontinuity design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
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