Informational asymmetries abound in economic decision making and often provide an incentive for deception through telling a lie or misrepresenting information. In this paper I use a cheap-talk sender-receiver experiment to show that telling the truth should be classified as deception too if the sender chooses the true message with the expectation that the receiver will not follow the sender’s (...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of institutions and institutional choice on truth-telling and trust in sender-receiver games. We find that in an institution with sanctioning opportunities, receivers sanction predominantly after having trusted lies. Individuals who sanction are responsible for truth-telling beyond standard equilibrium predictions and are more likely ...

A sender with private information often tries to influence the decisionmaker through well-informed intermediaries such as experts or critics. Both the sender and the intermediary may be independently objective or biased: the objective type passes on the most accurate information, while the biased type wants to push a particular agenda but also to appear objective. Although using one’s own infor...

We consider a simple mechanism design problem with private values in which each agent perceives Knightian uncertainty over his opponents’ types. Uncertainty is formalized using incomplete preferences as in Bewley (1986). We show that the seller can extract all gains from trade with a direct mechanism in which truth-telling is a Nash equilibrium, in the sense that no buyer has a unilateral incen...

OBJECTIVE This study examined a group of Taiwanese subjects at a medical university hospital regarding their attitudes toward truth telling of cancer. METHOD Self-report survey with convenience sampling of 195 participants admitted for a 3-day comprehensive health examination in a medical university hospital in Taiwan. Three instruments used to collect the data included the Brief Psychiatric ...

a busy outpatient clinic (he gives a horrifying example ofincompetent truth telling); it is an honesty which the patient has sought in the course of psychotherapeutically orientated discussion; it is an honesty which includes continuing support; and it is an honesty which, believes Dr Goldie, reduces unnecessary suffering and helps patients to survive it when it is inevitable. Such views, from ...

We consider the truthful implementation of the socially efficient allocation in a dynamic private value environment in which agents receive private information over time. We show that a suitable generalization of the Vickrey-ClarkGroves mechanism, based on the marginal contribution of each agent, leads to truth-telling in every period. A leading example of a dynamic allocation model is the sequ...

Herein we explore whether the social psychology theory of commitment via a truth-telling oath can reduce coordination failure. Using a classic sequential coordination game, we ask all players to sign voluntarily a truth-telling oath before playing the game with cheap-talk communication. Three results emerge with commitment-via-the-oath: (1) coordination increased by nearly 50 percent; (2) sende...

The present study examined the neural correlates of evaluations of both lying and truth-telling in different social contexts using fMRI methodology. The results demonstrated the differentiation between lying and truth-telling and between different types of lying in a network of brain regions. These regions included bilateral superior frontal gyrus (SFG), bilateral inferior parietal lobule (IPL)...

Background:Patients generally have the right to be informed of their condition, but the debate over the issue of truth disclosure is still present. The attempt of this study is to review the approaches toward truth- telling to cancer patients in Iran. Materials and Methods: This study is a narrative review that included articles published in Iran on attitudes toward telling the truth to cancer ...