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Who never tells a lie?

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  • Vanberg, Christoph

Abstract

Erat and Gneezy (2012) conduct an experiment to test whether people avoid lying in a situation where doing so would lead to a Pareto improvement. They conclude that many people exhibit such a "pure lie aversion." I argue that the experiment does not provide a reliable test for such an aversion, and that the evidence does not support the authors' conclusion. I conduct two new experiments which are explicitly designed to test for a 'pure' aversion to lying, and find no evidence for the existence of such a motivation. I discuss the implications of the findings for moral behavior and rule following more generally.

Suggested Citation

  • Vanberg, Christoph, 2015. "Who never tells a lie?," Working Papers 0581, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:awi:wpaper:0581
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Rosaz, Julie & Villeval, Marie Claire, 2012. "Lies and biased evaluation: A real-effort experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(2), pages 537-549.
    2. Jingnan (Cecilia) Chen & Daniel Houser, 2013. "Promises and Lies: An Experiment on Detecting Deception," Working Papers 1038, George Mason University, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, revised Feb 2013.
    3. Sanjiv Erat & Uri Gneezy, 2012. "White Lies," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 58(4), pages 723-733, April.
    4. Uri Gneezy, 2005. "Deception: The Role of Consequences," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(1), pages 384-394, March.
    5. Cappelen, Alexander W. & Sørensen, Erik Ø. & Tungodden, Bertil, 2013. "When do we lie?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 258-265.
    6. Greiner, Ben, 2004. "An Online Recruitment System for Economic Experiments," MPRA Paper 13513, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Gneezy, Uri & Rockenbach, Bettina & Serra-Garcia, Marta, 2013. "Measuring lying aversion," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 293-300.
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Valeria Maggian & Marie Claire Villeval, 2016. "Social preferences and lying aversion in children," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 19(3), pages 663-685, September.
    2. Vera Angelova & Tobias Regner, 2016. "Can a Bonus Overcome Moral Hazard? An Experiment on Voluntary Payments, Competition, and Reputation in Markets for Expert Services," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2016-027, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
    3. Vecchi, Martina, 2022. "Groups and socially responsible production: An experiment with farmers," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 196(C), pages 372-392.

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