| 讲座简介： | Despite of the fact that lying has been well studied in the literature (Gneezy, 2005; Gneezy et al., 2013; Abeler et al., 2014; Gneezy, 2018), the understanding of how information environment and reporting format influence individual’s reporting behavior is limited. We consider an incentivized information-reporting experiment, where the state can be either high, medium, or low, and some information regarding the state is revealed to a decision-maker before he/she sends his/her report of the state information. The payoff is only determined by their reports instead of the true states. We categorize individuals’ behavior into three types: truth-telling, lying, and guessing. Depending on whether the subject receives full, partial, or no information regarding the state, and whether the required report format is deterministic or probabilistic, our within-subject two-dimensional design consists of in total 6 treatments. The experimental results on deterministic report show that the psychological cost of guessing is higher than truth-telling but less than lying. The discrepancies between deterministic reporting and probabilistic reporting indicate that there exist two conflicting factors influencing the probabilistic report results: On the one hand, participants have more incentive to misreport for a higher payoff; On the other hand, participants may feel more pressure when they input the possibility percentages. Our findings confirm that guessing is an ambiguous but significant type of behavior, distinguishing from lying and truth-telling, and provide a better understanding regarding how information environment and report format lead to honest or dishonest behavior. |
