- Honesty - Lab and field experiments Flashcards
What is the traditional economic view?
- rational utility maximisers
- compare all costs and benefits of all alternatives
- logical about future and risks
- only care about their economic wellbeing - selfish
why is honesty important
contracts broken - gov corrupt - costly for society
- standard economic theory (SET) = people will lie if it is net beneficial for them
Fischbacher & Follmi-Heusi (2013)
= lab - fully controlled
the die in a cup task
- measures intrinsic honesty
describe ‘die in a cup’ task
- what is the SET answer
- subjects asked to roll die in price twice and report the die in first roll - they will receive a payment based on the number they report - 6=0, 5=5 …
- incentive to lie by getting to roll twice
- cant verify the number they get
- use probability to gauge dishonesty levels
- people that roll 6 = fully honest
- they will report 5 and get highest payoff - benefit themselves
what are the results from die in a cup experiment
- rolling 4 and 5 is higher than benchmark
- modal reported number is 5, 4 is second - not big difference between the rest
- lower payoffs get underreported
- assume those that roll 6 are fully honest = 39%
- results not changed by increasing stakes - doesn’t change deception levels
what are the explanations for the die in a cup results
- why didnt all lie about getting 5 and maximise utility
- lying aversion = psychological cost
- lies in disguise = want their lie to seem credible so say 4 or 3
- protecting self image = maintain positive self concept
Abeler, Nonsenzo , Raymond (2016)
replicated cup in die
- put all the studies done together across the world and carries out meta anyalsis to compare results
- data from 90 studies and 47 countries
- standardised reports = comparable
- 0 = full honesty
- 1 = full dishonesty
what are the results from the meta analysis and explanation of honesty
- people are patially dishonest
- stake size doesnt really matter
- two main motivations for honesty = psychologically costly + reputational concerns
Pruckner 2013
- field experiment on honesty
- newspaper in Austria by honour system
- three treatments
1. paper costs 0.60
2. stealing is illegal
3. thank you for being honest
results of newspaper austria
2/3 do not pay
most pay less than 0.60
legal appeal has no effect
moral appeal increases payments
- increases the average payment for paper to 5
- shows that there is a pyschological cost of lying - resonates with morality
Dai (2018)
- cheating in lab predicts fraud in the field = behaviour in lab replicated diversity of degree of moral firmness and commiting fraud
- people that violate norms by lying have lower intrinsic values than others - commit fraud
- stood outside of train station recruiting people to experiment - types of people: ticket and say they havent missed fares, no ticket, fine office
- did the cup in a die experiemnt with them
results from cup in die Lyon train
- most dishonest = no ticket and say theyve missed fares in last 10 journeys
- more honest = people that paid fine
- honester = people with ticket
Gatcher (2016)
- how does honesty differ across societies that differ in corruption institutions and rule of law
- 23 countries
- used die in a cup task to measure intrinsic honesty
- used prevalence of rule violation index to measure the extent of rule violations in each country
- prevalnce of rule violations influence intrinsic honesty
results from comparing cup in die to prevalence of rule violation index
- more money claimed in countries with higher prevalence
- higher degree of dishonensty
Cohn (2019)
- field
- lost wallet returned to banks, musuems receptions
- 355 cities, 40 countries
- measure whether the wallet is returned
- 2 conditions - 1. with money 2. without money
