Context-dependent cheating: experimental evidence from 16 countries

Article

Pascual-Ezama, D., Fosgaard, T., Cardenas, J., Kujal, P., Veszteg, R., Gil-Gómez de Liaño, B., Gunia, B., Weichselbaumer, D., Hilken, K., Armenak, A., Delnoij, J., Proestakis, A., Tira, M., Patromo, Y., Jaber-López, T. and Branas-Garza, P. 2015. Context-dependent cheating: experimental evidence from 16 countries. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 116, pp. 379-386. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.04.020
TypeArticle
TitleContext-dependent cheating: experimental evidence from 16 countries
AuthorsPascual-Ezama, D., Fosgaard, T., Cardenas, J., Kujal, P., Veszteg, R., Gil-Gómez de Liaño, B., Gunia, B., Weichselbaumer, D., Hilken, K., Armenak, A., Delnoij, J., Proestakis, A., Tira, M., Patromo, Y., Jaber-López, T. and Branas-Garza, P.
Abstract

Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their
institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.

KeywordsHonesty corruption economic experiments cultural differences
PublisherElsevier
JournalJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization
ISSN0167-2681
Publication dates
Online21 May 2015
Print01 Aug 2015
Publication process dates
Deposited08 Jun 2015
Accepted25 Apr 2015
Output statusPublished
Publisher's version
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Copyright Statement

©2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CCBY-NC-ND license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.04.020
LanguageEnglish
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