American Economic Review Vol. 108 No. 2 2018

Lying Aversion and the Size of the Lie

Uri Gneezy¹; Agne Kajackaite²; Joel Sobel³

¹ Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, and CREED, University of Amsterdam (email: ) · ² WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, D-10785, Germany (email: ) · ³ Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 (email: )

Abstract

This paper studies lying. An agent randomly picks a number from a known distribution. She can then report any number and receive a monetary payoff based only on her report. The paper presents a model of lying costs that generates hypotheses regarding behavior. In an experiment, we find that the highest fraction of lies is from reporting the maximal outcome, but some participants do not make the maximal lie. More participants lie partially when the experimenter cannot observe their outcomes than when the experimenter can verify the observed outcome. Partial lying increases when the prior probability of the highest outcome decreases.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20161553

Volume

108

Issue

2

Pages

419-453

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

APA 7 MLA 9 Chicago (author–date) Harvard Elsevier Harvard (JFE, JBF…) The Accounting Review Academy of Management American Marketing Association INFORMS (Management Science) Copy citation Copied ✓