About This Project

Evidence from laboratory experiments shows that individuals are lying averse and that they do not lie maximally when the monetary incentives from lying outweigh the gains from being honest. However, recent papers rise the question whether these results can predict cheating behaviour in normal daily life. My research aims to study the relationship between cheating behaviour in the lab and in the field.

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What is the context of this research?

Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, (2013) shows that most individuals tell the truth even when lying would be more profitable. In addition, Abeler, Nosenzo, and Raymond (2016) study the extent to which people lie and report that many subjects do not lie maximally. However, how much these results can tell about lying in everyday life is not clear. Problems such as experimenter scrutiny, lack of anonymity, and artificiality of the lab environment undermine the generalizability of laboratory results on cheating (Levitt and List, 2007). How can evidence from the lab be trusted to explain cheating in everyday life where anonymity and non-observability are in place?

What is the significance of this project?

Following the thought of the german philosopher Immanuel Kant, honesty is considered as a virtue and to tell the truth is a duty. While most people will agree with this thought, lying is a widespread phenomenon in our society. DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer, and Epstein (1996) found that people lies in 20% to 31% of their daily social interactions. Moreover, between 72% to 82% were willing to lie again under the same circumstances. Thus, understanding what drives economic agents to tell the truth is of economic importance, from banking to insurance. Understanding the correlation between lying behaviour in the lab and in the field will provide important results that can be exploited in order to reduce dishonesty in our daily life.

What are the goals of the project?

This project aims to study the correlation between cheating in the laboratory and cheating in everyday life. I plan to conduct a study similar to Potters and Stoop (2016) that differs on two main aspects. First, I will develop a new "mind game" that, in contrast with the current literature, will allow me to collect individual observations instead of drawing inference on distributions. This game should remove any reputational concern making the lab and field behaviour more comparable. Second, in the field experiment I will implement a task analogous to the one in the lab, where the decision to cheat is an active choice. These two novelties will make possible to look at the correlation in cheating at the individual level and to classify agents according to their behaviour.