Testing guilt aversion with an exogenous shift in beliefs

We conduct a laboratory experiment to test whether subjects tend to meet the expectations of others (the guilt aversion hypothesis). The speci…city of our approach is that second-order beliefs are manipulated exogenously just by changing the parameters of the experimental game. In particular, we consider a simple communication game where the sender is perfectly informed about his material payo¤ from lying. At the same time, the receiver knows only the ex-ante distribution of the sender’s payo¤. By changing this distribution between the experimental treatments, we achieve an exogenous variation of the receiver’s belief about the sender’s incentives for lying (and hence about its probability) while keeping the sender’s actual incentives for lying …xed. The results show that the rate of lying is signi…cantly lower when the receiver is supposed to have higher payo¤expectations, however only in the case when such expectations are also rationalized from the sender’s ex-ante perspective.