Enjoy the silence: an experiment on truth-telling |
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Authors: | Santiago Sánchez-Pagés Marc Vorsatz |
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Institution: | (1) Economics, University of Edinburgh, 31 Buccleuch Place, EH8 9JT Edinburgh, UK;(2) Fundación de Estudios de Economía Applicada (FEDEA), Calle Jorge Juan 46, 28001 Madrid, Spain |
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Abstract: | We analyze experimentally two sender–receiver games with conflictive preferences. In the first game, the sender can choose
to tell the truth, to lie, or to remain silent. The latter strategy is costly. In the second game, the receiver must decide
additionally whether or not to costly punish the sender after having observed the history of the game. We investigate the
existence of two kinds of social preferences: lying aversion and preference for truth-telling. In the first game, senders
tell the truth more often than predicted by the sequential equilibrium analysis, they remain silent frequently, and there
exists a positive correlation between the probability of being truthful and the probability of remaining silent. Our main
experimental result for the extended game shows that those subjects who punish the sender with a high probability after being
deceived are precisely those who send fewer but more truthful messages. Finally, we solve for the Perfect Bayesian Nash Equilibria
of a reduced form of the baseline game with two types of senders. The equilibrium predictions obtained suggest that the observed
excessive truth-telling in the baseline game can be explained by lying aversion but not by a preference for truth-telling.
Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Financial support through the Ramón y Cajal program of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science is gratefully acknowledged.
This work was initiated while the author was working at Maastricht University. |
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Keywords: | Experiment Lying aversion Social preferences Strategic information transmission Truth-telling |
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