Delayed Honesty

Many economic interactions involve the release of private information to other agents. Often, there is a trade-off between truthful reporting, which may be morally desirable and/or socially optimal and lying, which may be individually optimal, i.e., payoff-maximizing. Rejecting the idea that economic agents are purely interested in their own monetary gains and without any ``moral compass'', a recent literature in economics has demonstrated a number of factors which influence an individual's degree of honesty, such as the possible gains from lying, the degree of social observability, and the ex-ante likelihood of different states of the world.

In this project, we investigate how the timing of when the costs and benefits of lying occur, affect people’s degree of dishonesty. In particular, we are interested in the following three questions: (i) How is lying affected when the benefits from misreporting accrue delayed rather than immediately? (ii) How does increased mental engagement with the lie affect misreporting when benefits are delayed? (iii) How does a delay between the time when private information is obtained and the time when people report it affect dishonesty? We study these questions in an online experiment conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).