Reputation and lying aversion in the die roll paradigm: Reducing ambiguity fosters honest behavior

This paper examines reputation as motive for lying aversion. In a control treatment, participants roll a six-sided die and report the outcome, which the experimenter cannot observe. In a digital die treatment, the outcome of the die roll is determined randomly on the computer. Contrary to prior literature, we reduce ambiguity in the digital die treatment by making observability common knowledge. We find that partial lying and full lying disappear when the experimenter can track participants' behavior. This result can be explained by reputational costs: Participants care about how they are viewed by the experimenter and abstain from lying.     

Pay-what-you-want in groups – evidence from a field experiment

Pay-what-you-want (PWYW) mechanisms are a specific form of voluntary market payment. While a large number of recent studies have considered their design options, the aspect of group behaviour in PWYW situations has not been investigated, although a substantial part of payment decisions occur in group constellations. We provide initial evidence by running a field experiment implementing a PWYW mechanism in a cinema characterized by group attendance, finding that groups chose to pay similar amounts as individuals. Group payments can be increased by a prosocial framing of the decision, while an increase in group size and repeated participation reduce voluntary payments. We thus show that group payment decisions in PWYW situations are characterized by altruism concerns rather than in-group egoism.