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Enjoy the silence: an experiment on truth-telling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Santiago Sánchez-Pagés  and
Marc Vorsatz
Santiago Sánchez-Pagés*
Affiliation:
Economics, University of Edinburgh, 31 Buccleuch Place, EH8 9JT Edinburgh, UK
Marc Vorsatz*
Affiliation:
Fundación de Estudios de Economía Applicada (FEDEA), Calle Jorge Juan 46, 28001 Madrid, Spain
*
e-mail: [email protected]
e-mail: [email protected]
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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.

Keywords

ExperimentLying aversionSocial preferencesStrategic information transmissionTruth-telling

JEL classification

C73: Stochastic and Dynamic Games • Evolutionary Games • Repeated Games D83: Search • Learning • Information and Knowledge • Communication • Belief • Unawareness C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 220 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2008

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Footnotes

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.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-008-9211-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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