Lies in Disguise. An experimental study on cheating

In this paper we present a new design which allows us to draw inferences on the distribution of lying behavior among the population. Participants received a dice in order to determine their payoff anonymously. Whatever they reported to have rolled, they received as payoff. 39% of the subjects were honest and maximally 22% of them were lying completely. Interestingly we found subjects who lied but who did not maximize their income by doing so. Using additional experiments, we can show that a compelling explanation for this behavior is the desire to maintain a favorable self-concept, including honesty and non-greediness.Lie detection, honesty, deception, experimental design

Unequal Opportunities and Distributive Justice

We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. People earn money in a real effort experiment and can then decide how to distribute it among themselves and another subjects. We compare situations in which randomly chosen people get access to performance enhancing education with situations in which either only luck or only performance determines outcome. We find that unequal opportunities evoke a preference for redistribution that is comparable to the situation when luck alone determines the allocation. However, people with unequal access to education are more likely to disagree about the appropriate distribution.Distribution, Inequality of opportunities, Negotiation, Education, Experiment

Unequal Opportunities and Distributive Justice

There is well established empirical evidence that more redistribution occurs when luck rather than performance determines the earnings. We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. In this experiment, we can control the information about the role of luck and effort. We find that unequal opportunities evoke a preference for redistribution that is comparable to the situation when luck alone determines the allocation rather than performance. Furthermore, unequal opportunities reduce performance incentives.Distribution, Inequality of opportunities, Negotiation, Education, Experiment

Deception and Self-Deception

Why are people so often overconfident? We conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis that people become overconfident to more effectively persuade or deceive others. After performing a cognitively challenging task, half of our subjects are informed that they can earn money by convincing others of their superior performance. The privately elicited beliefs of informed subjects are significantly more confident than the beliefs of subjects in the control condition. By generating exogenous variation in confidence with a noisy performance signal, we are also able to show that higher confidence indeed makes subjects more persuasive in the subsequent face-to-face interactions

Lies in Disguise : an experimental study on cheating

In this paper we present a new design which allows us to draw inferences on the distribution of lying behavior among the population. Participants received a dice in order to determine their payoff anonymously. Whatever they reported to have rolled, they received as payoff. 39% of the subjects were honest and maximally 22% of them were lying completely. Interestingly we found subjects who lied but who did not maximize their income by doing so. Using additional experiments, we can show that a compelling explanation for this behavior is the desire to maintain a favorable self-concept, including honesty and non-greediness

Voluntary Standards and Coordination in Public Goods Games

Contributions to public goods are often unobservable. In order to make contributions visible, voluntary standards are used, which make a particular contribution level publicly observable. This paper investigates the effect of such partial information on the contributions to public goods. First, we observe that the implementation of a too low standard level leads to the lowest efficiency. Second, we find that standards function as a coordination device. Higher standards give rise to higher modal contribution but the likelihood that the standard level is reached gets lower. Third, conditional cooperation is observed in the sense that subjects are more likely to comply with the standard as the number of group members who previously complied with it is higher.publishe

Unequal Opportunities and Distributive Justice

We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. People earn money in a real effort experiment and can then decide how to distribute it among themselves and another subjects. We compare situations in which randomly chosen people get access to performance enhancing education with situations in which either only luck or only performance determines outcome. We find that unequal opportunities evoke a preference for redistribution that is comparable to the situation when luck alone determines the allocation. However, people with unequal access to education are more likely to disagree about the appropriate distribution

Unequal opportunities and distributive justice

There is well established empirical evidence that more redistribution occurs when luck rather than performance determines the earnings. We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. In this experiment, we can control the information about the role of luck and effort. We find that unequal opportunities evoke a preference for redistribution that is comparable to the situation when luck alone determines the allocation rather than performance. Furthermore, unequal opportunities reduce performance incentives

Wearing a mask - For yourself or for others? : Behavioral correlates of mask wearing among COVID-19 frontline workers

Human behavior can have effects on oneself and externalities on others. Mask wearing is such a behavior in the current pandemic. What motivates people to wear face masks in public when mask wearing is voluntary or not enforced? Which benefits should the policy makers rather emphasize in information campaigns—the reduced chances of getting the SARS-CoV-2 virus (benefits for oneself) or the reduced chances of transmitting the virus (benefits for others in the society)? In this paper, we link measured risk preferences and other-regarding preferences to mask wearing habits among 840 surveyed employees of two large Swiss hospitals. We find that the leading mask-wearing motivations change with age: While for older people, mask wearing habits are best explained by their self-regarding risk preferences, younger people are also motivated by other-regarding concerns. Our results are robust to different specifications including linear probability models, probit models and Lasso covariate selection models. Our findings thus allow drawing policy implications for effectively communicating public-health recommendations to frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.publishe