Do I care if the others lie? Current and future effects of delegation of lying
Serhiy Kandul and Oliver Kirchkamp
In this study we want to find out how people behave in a situation where they can themselves lie or they can share the responsibility for lying with others. To answer this question we study a sender-receiver game followed by a dictator game. It is possible to delegate the act of lying in the sender-receiver game and take pro-social actions in the subsequent dictator game. We examine how delegation affects the outcomes of current and future ethical decisions. We find that a non-trivial fraction of participants delegate their decision and delegation is associated with higher transfers in the subsequent dictator game.JEL: C72, D82
Keywords: Sender-Receiver games, moral balancing, guilt aversion.
- Here is the most recent version of the working paper as of 18 March 2018.
- Instructions for the experiment
- Data and R files
- On 19 March 2018, the paper has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics.