Attempting to Detect a Lie: Do We Think it Through?

Iuliia Grabova, Hedda Nielsen and Georg Weizsäcker
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Iuliia Grabova: HU Berlin, DIW Berlin
Hedda Nielsen: HU Berlin

No 477, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: Game-theoretic analyses of communication rely on beliefs – especially, the receiver’s belief about the truth status of an utterance and the sender’s belief about the reaction to the utterance – but research that provides measurements of such beliefs is still in its infancy. Our experiment examines the use of second-order beliefs, measuring belief hierarchies regarding a message that may be a lie. In a two-player communication game between a sender and a receiver, the sender knows the state of the world and has a transparent incentive to deceive the receiver. The receiver chooses a binary reaction. For a wide set of non-equilibrium beliefs, the reaction and the receiver’s second-order belief should dissonate: she should follow the sender’s statement if and only if she believes that the sender believes that she does not follow the statement. The opposite is true empirically, constituting a new pattern of inconsistency between actions and beliefs.

Keywords: strategic information transmission; lying; higher-order beliefs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
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