This paper reports on a laboratory experiment which investigates the impact of institutions and institutional choice in constant-sum sender-receiver games. We compare individual sender and receiver behavior in two different institutions: A sanction-free institution which is given by the bare sender-receiver game and a sanctioning institution which in addition offers the receiver the opportunity to (costly) sanction the sender after receiving feedback on the senders private information. We conduct the experiment in two phases: First, individuals are randomly assigned to an institution, and second they can choose the institution themselves.We find that sanctioning takes place predominantly after the receiver has trusted a lie by the sender. Those who are responsible for sanctioning are also responsible for truth-telling in excess with respect to models of rational payoff-maximizing agents.Thereby, the sanctioning institution exhibits more truth-telling. Most importantly, agents who sanction reveal preference for the sanctioning institution while the other subjects almost exclusively opt for the sanction-free institution. As a consequence, both institutions typically coexist in the second phase of the experiment and the sanctioning institution exhibits a higher level of truth-telling and lower aggregate material payoffs.To offer an explanation of our experimental findings, we formalize preferences for truth-telling as psychological payoffs and analyze the sender-receiver game as a dynamic psychological game à la Battigalli and Dufwenberg (2006). We demonstrate that standard models of social preferences are not able to explain observed sanctioning behavior and excessive truth-telling. Explicit psychological costs of lying and the exposition to a lie, however, are able to fill this gap. To this end, we model deontological and consequentialistic preferences for truth-telling and evaluate their respective explanatory power.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Maastricht : METEOR, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization in its series Research Memoranda with number
034.