Deception Aversion by Evan Friedman

Join us for this week's joint event in the Microeconomics and Behavioural, Experimental and Development Economics Seminar Series, Spring Term 2024

Join Evan Friedman, from the Paris School of Economics, as they present this week's seminar on Deception Aversion by.  

Abstract

Conveying private information to interested parties is central to many economic activities. In such interactions, the sender may lie by misreporting the truth but may also deceive by inducing inaccurate beliefs about the payoff-relevant state. While a huge experimental literature documents aversion to lying, there is little evidence regarding aversion to deception. Deception aversion is conceptually difficult to document because it depends on unobserved second-order beliefs: the sender’s beliefs over the receiver’s beliefs (over the payoff-relevant state). In this paper, we introduce a novel game and show theoretically how to identify deception aversion from choice data alone, with minimal assumptions on second-order beliefs. We run a laboratory experiment and find strong support for deception aversion that is robust to several natural variations of the game. Many subjects lie in order to avoid deception. Structural estimates imply that 28% of subjects are averse to deception.

This seminar will be held in the Economics Common Room on Friday 7 March, at 3.00pm. This event is open to all levels of study and is also open to the public. To register your place, please contact the seminar organisers.

This event is part of the Microeconomics and  Behavioural, Experimental, and Development Economics Research Seminar Series