The Good, the Bad, and the Angry: An experimental study on the heterogeneity of people's (dis)honest behavior

We introduce a novel decision problem to experimentally study situations where people know that they can lie, but do not initially know the economic consequences: they have to invest time to find them out. We report numerous findings, the most intriguing of which is that, in our setting, people can be divided in three types: the Good, who act honestly independently of the corresponding payoff; the Bad, who maximize their payoff without even checking the payoff for telling the truth; the Angry, who first look at the payoff for telling the truth and then lie only if that is low.