IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rco/dpaper/477.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Attempting to Detect a Lie: Do We Think it Through?

Author

Listed:
  • Iuliia Grabova

    (HU Berlin, DIW Berlin)

  • Hedda Nielsen

    (HU Berlin)

  • Georg Weizsäcker

    (HU Berlin)

Abstract

Game-theoretic analyses of communication rely on beliefs – especially, the receiver’s belief about the truth status of an utterance and the sender’s belief about the reaction to the utterance – but research that provides measurements of such beliefs is still in its infancy. Our experiment examines the use of second-order beliefs, measuring belief hierarchies regarding a message that may be a lie. In a two-player communication game between a sender and a receiver, the sender knows the state of the world and has a transparent incentive to deceive the receiver. The receiver chooses a binary reaction. For a wide set of non-equilibrium beliefs, the reaction and the receiver’s second-order belief should dissonate: she should follow the sender’s statement if and only if she believes that the sender believes that she does not follow the statement. The opposite is true empirically, constituting a new pattern of inconsistency between actions and beliefs.

Suggested Citation

  • Iuliia Grabova & Hedda Nielsen & Georg Weizsäcker, 2023. "Attempting to Detect a Lie: Do We Think it Through?," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 477, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    • Handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:477
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/uploads/discussion_paper/477.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    strategic information transmission; lying; higher-order beliefs;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:477. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Viviana Lalli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://rationality-and-competition.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.