Deception: The Role of Uncertain Consequences

Authors

Subhasish Dugar, University of Utah
Arnab Mitra, Portland State UniversityFollow
Quazi Shahriar, San Diego State University

Sponsor

Faculty Enhancement Award 2016-17, Portland State University.

Published In

European Economic Review

Document Type

Post-Print

Publication Date

5-1-2019

Subjects

Economics -- Psychological aspects, Game Theory, Uncertainty, Decision making

Abstract

We study how decisions to lie extend to risky environments. We provide experimental evidence from a sender-receiver game where there is uncertainty over the amount by which a sender's lie reduces its receiver's payoff, which is known only to potential liar. Even though all reduction amounts are equiprobable, ex-post beliefs elicited from senders suggest that, unlike truth-tellers, most liars underestimate the extent of the actual reduction in the receiver's payoff and appear to exploit this self-serving bias, resulting in substantially more lying relative to a baseline treatment without the uncertainty. Subsequent treatments confirm the bias by either providing additional evidence or by removing possible confounds. An intervention treatment nudging senders toward correcting the bias reduces lying.

Rights

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Description

Definitive version published by Elsevier. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.01.010

DOI

10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.01.010

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/28929

Citation Details

Dugar, S., Mitra, A., & Shahriar, Q. (2019). Deception: The Role of Uncertain Consequences. European Economic Review, 114, 1-18.