Does Competition Affect Truth Telling? An Experiment with Rating Agencies*

Beliefs and truth-telling: A laboratory experiment

We conduct a laboratory experiment with a constant-sum sender-receiver game to investigate the impact of individuals’ firstand second-order beliefs on truth-telling. While senders are more likely to lie if they expect the receiver to trust their message (which is in line with expected payoff maximization), they are also more likely to tell the truth if they believe the receiver expects them to ...

Telling the truth with compassion.

Does Competition Affect Giving? An Experimental Study∗

We explore whether natural human competitiveness can be exploited to stimulate charitable giving in a controlled laboratory experiment involving three different treatments of a sequential “dictator game.” Without disclosing the actual amounts given and kept, in each period players are publicly ranked — by the amount they give away, by the amount they keep for themselves, or spuriously. Our resu...

Does Competition Affect Giving?∗

Charities often devise fund-raising strategies that exploit natural human competitiveness in combination with the desire for public recognition. We explore whether institutions promoting competition can affect altruistic giving even when possibilities for public acclaim are minimal. In a controlled laboratory experiment based on a sequential “dictator game”, we find that subjects tend to give m...

Creating Truth-Telling Incentives with the Bayesian Truth Serum

Vol. L (June 2013), 289–302 289 *Ray Weaver is Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Harvard University (e-mail: [email protected]). Drazen Prelec is Professor of Management, Management Science and Economics, MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (e-mail: [email protected]). This research was supported by NSF SES0519141 and the John...