Dishonesty in Behavioral Economics

Alessandro Bucciol, Natalia Montinari, Alessandro Bucciol, Natalia Montinari

• Editorial: Academic Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780128158586
• Categoría: Economía
• Categoría: Econometría

Dishonesty in Behavioral Economics provides a rigorous and comprehensive overview of dishonesty, presenting state-of-the-art research that adopts a behavioral economics perspective. Throughout the volume, contributors emphasize the effects of psychological, social, and cognitive factors on the decision-making process. In contrast to related titles, Dishonesty in Behavioral Economics emphasizes the importance of empirical research methodologies. Its contributors demonstrate how various methods applied to similar research questions can lead to different results. This characteristic is important because, of course, it is difficult to obtain reliable measures of dishonesty.

• Reviews many key issues in the literature around lying, cheating, fraudulence, and deception
• Covers both state-of-the-art methods and data collection mechanisms (e.g., laboratory experiments, field experiments, online surveys)
• Discusses novel interdisciplinary research findings and from them proposes new avenues of research

Section 1

Dishonesty in behavioral economics: An overview

Chapter 1

Dishonesty in behavioral economics: An overview

Alessandro Bucciol¹; Natalia Montinari^{2 1} Department of Economics, University of Verona, Verona, Italy
² Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

Abstract

Dishonesty is a pervasive human behavior occurring virtually in all contexts, and manifests itself as the disposition to lie, cheat, fraud, or deceive. This behavior usually gives individuals a personal advantage at the expense of the society. This chapter briefly reviews the contributions included in the book, which aims to provide a rigorous and comprehensive overview of dishonesty, collecting state-of-the-art research on this topical field adopting a behavioral economics perspective, which focuses on the effects of psychological, social, and cognitive factors of the decision-making process. This book highlights the importance of the empirical research methodologies to study dishonesty both in the lab and in the field.

Keywords

Dishonesty; Cheating; Behavioral economics; Experimental economics; Lab and field experiments

JEL Classification

D91; D63

Chapter outline

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Dishonesty among children and young adults
• 3. Dishonesty, individual, and social preferences
• 4. Dishonesty in daily life
• 5. Further topics on dishonesty in behavioral economics
• 6. Concluding remarks
• References

1 Introduction

Dishonesty is a pervasive human behavior occurring virtually in all contexts, and manifests itself as the disposition to lie, cheat, fraud, or deceive. This behavior usually gives individuals a personal advantage at the expense of the society. Over the last decade, researchers from various disciplines have investigated the topic from theoretical as well as empirical (including experimental) point of view. A recent comprehensive review can be found in Jacobsen et al. (2018). However, much has yet to be learned about the reasons behind dishonesty, and the characteristics of who is more prone to act dishonestly.

This book aims to provide a rigorous and comprehensive overview of dishonesty, collecting state-of-the-art research on this topical field adopting a behavioral economics perspective which focuses on the effects of psychological, social, and cognitive factors of the decision-making process. In contrast to other works dealing with the same or similar topics, this book highlights the importance of the empirical research methodologies discussing how different methods applied to similar research questions can lead to different results. One key reason is that it is difficult to obtain reliable measures of dishonesty. In fact, it is complicate to observe or replicate real-life situations involving misbehavior. On the one hand, those studies where the experimenters try to observe participants acting dishonestly on a cheating task suffer from being artificial and threatened by experimental demand effects, with the consequence that they may affect the magnitude of the phenomenon. On the other hand, self-reported information about dishonesty can be unreliable because people may try to conceal their behavior; therefore studies using self-reported data may underreport the size of the phenomenon. In general, since each method has advantages and disadvantages, in the study of cheating more than in other topics, every research should be seen as complementary—rather than substitute—to other research using different methods.

The book is divided into three parts, which are presented in this introduction in connection with the literature. Each part consists of several contributions on the most recent trends of research on dishonesty, written by influent scholars in behavioral and experimental economics. Unfortunately, we had to make a choice, and exclude from the book topics where dishonesty is also pervasive, such as dishonesty in the financial sector and in the public sector. We briefly discuss them in a separate section.

The remainder of this introductory chapter is as follows: Sections 2–4 provide an overview of the three parts in which the book is organized. Section 2 is about “Dishonesty among children and young adults”; Section 3 is on “Dishonesty, individual and social preferences”; Section 4 is on “Dishonesty in daily life.” Section 5 deals with further issues on dishonesty that are not discussed explicitly in the book, i.e., dishonesty in the financial sector and in the public sector. Finally, Section 6 concludes and mentions desirable avenues of development of the field.

2 Dishonesty among children and young adults

There seems to be consensus in psychology that most of the behavior we observe among adults was present also when adults were children, adolescents, or young adults (e.g., Harbaugh et al., 2002; Sutter and Kocher, 2007). A growing body of literature is therefore paying more attention on the behavior of children to better understand the behavior of adults and to disentangle innate factors and influences due to culture and socialization. This trend applies to the literature on dishonesty as well (Bucciol and Piovesan, 2011; Gneezy et al., 2009; Houser et al., 2016; Maggian and Villeval, 2016). An advantage of studying dishonesty among children is that they have fewer routines than adults and more freedom in deciding how to behave (see e.g., Runco and Cayirdag, 2012, on creativity and Rakoczy and Schmidt, 2013, on the understanding of social norms) and, with their spontaneity and natural capacity to be uninhibited, they can provide to the researcher evidence that is more reliable and less affected by the environment.

In Chapter 2.1, Heyman, Zhao, Compton, and Lee provide a comprehensive overview of the psychological literature on young children’s cheating behavior. The authors document that children manifest whether they are inclined to dishonesty as early as age 4, and that their decision between honest and dishonest behavior is later mitigated by psychosocial factors such as self-concept and social image.

In Chapter 2.2, Cadsby, Song, and Yang try to depict a demographic profile of the dishonest child. In particular, they look at parental presence or absence among children in ages 8–10 living in rural or urban areas. They find widespread cheating and no particular connection with parental presence. However, they observe more frequent cheating among urban females aged 8 and in the presence of low levels of risk aversion.

In Chapter 2.3, Battiston, Gamba, and Rotondi focus their attention on adolescents belonging to a youth organization well known for its values of honesty, integrity, and respect for others. Not surprisingly, in this sample the authors find infrequent cheating. More interestingly, dishonesty seems correlated with self-confidence.

Chapters 2.4 and 2.5 focus on university students and their behavior during academic exams. In Chapter 2.4, Cicognani asks students and former students to indicate if and to what extent they cheated during written exams. She finds that dishonesty is widespread, and that it is more likely associated with trust and the belief that others also cheat, and less likely associated to awareness of the sanction. This research highlights two interesting facts. First, the strong evidence on the belief about the others could reflect a sort of self-justification (“Many cheat, and so do I”). Second, in some cases cheating may arise when there is ignorance about the punishment. Promoting campaigns on advertising the sanctions in response to misbehavior could be a useful dissuading tool.

In Chapter 2.5, Kliger and Siev expose students performing written exams to exam cover pages reporting different statements about the standards of conduct during exams. The authors see that statements are useless unless they are accompanied by checkboxes; moreover, they find that punitive warnings are also ineffective. This research thus suggests that a simple nudge, recalling correct behavior and making the individual responsible for her actions helps to fight dishonesty.

The empirical chapters in this part exploit the methodology of lab-in-the-field experiments (Chapters 2.2 and 2.3), online surveys (Chapter 2.4), and field experiments (Chapter 2.5). Research on dishonesty frequently uses laboratory (lab) experiments where individuals make artificial decisions under controlled conditions. In contrast, field experiments observe individual decisions in real-life scenarios. Here human behavior is expected not to be affected by the artificial environment of the lab experiments but, at the same time, confounding factors can possibly influence decisions. For a thorough definition of field experiments in contrast to lab experiments, see Harrison and List (2004). In recent years, mixtures of lab and field experiments, called lab-in-the-field experiments, have been growing in popularity. Their idea is to test the validity of lab experiments in the field, that is, outside the lab. Lab-in-the-fie...