Experimental Design Details
We implement a simple cheating game (a) to examine whether commitment requests can increase honesty and (b) to test whether freedom-restricting forms of commitment requests backfire. The data collection takes place online. Subjects registered at the laboratory are invited to an online experiment. After logging in to a website hosting the experiment, subjects are informed that the session consists of two parts: a survey and a short experiment. In the first part, subjects received a payoff of 3 Euro for answering a 15-minute survey on the German inheritance tax schedule. We add this part to the experiment for two reasons. First, by placing other elements before the cheating decision, we followed the standard experimental protocol in the literature. Second, and more importantly, we include this survey to introduce our commitment requests more naturally and mitigate experimenter demand effects. Specifically, directly after the welcome page, the website re-directs subjects in the treatment groups to a page where they are asked to sign the no-cheating declaration right at the beginning of the session. Subjects sign the declaration by typing their full name (first and last name) into a text field. This design element connects the commitment to the entire session rather than to the cheating experiment.
At the beginning of the session's second part, the participants read instructions presented on the computer screen. The instructions inform subjects that the experiment will start with a computerized random draw of a number between one and six that they will be asked to self-report. Subjects also learn from the instructions that their additional payoff (i.e., the payoff in addition to the fixed payment for participating in the survey) will be 5 Euro if they report a 5 and zero if they report a number from the set {0,1,2,3,4,6}.
The computerized random draw simulates the process of drawing a chip from an envelope. Subjects first see an envelope containing six chips numbered between one and six on their screen. Subjects then see the chips being shuffled for a few seconds, and that one randomly selected chip falls out of the envelope. On the next screen, subjects are asked to report their draw by entering the number into a field on the screen. Before reporting their draw, subjects can also click a button to show the instructions and the payoff structure again. They can also click a button to display the result of the random draw again. After subjects have reported their number, subjects are asked to answer a few survey questions on individual characteristics (including age, gender, etc). Finally, subjects are informed about their payoff, and that the payoff will be paid to them in the form of an Amazon voucher. Subjects are informed about the fact that they are paid via Amazon voucher already in the invitation to the experiment.
The fact that the random draw is computerized makes cheating observable to the researchers at an individual level. This design element comes with the benefit of a much higher statistical power compared to approaches that identify cheating by evaluating the empirical distribution of self-reports against the expected distribution under truthful reporting. If individuals believe that the instructions correctly describe the experimental conditions, the expected (immediate) monetary sanction should nevertheless be zero. We neither include a monetary punishment for cheating, nor do we communicate a positive probability of such a punishment. Instead, the instructions highlight that a subject's payoff depends exclusively on the reported number.
We complement the experimental data with survey data to elicit the subjects' psychological reactance. The survey-based standard measure for a subject's reactance type used in this paper is Hong's Psychological Reactance Scale. The original scale consists of 14 statements that approximate the degree to which one person shows reactance. For instance, one statement is ``regulations trigger a sense of resistance in me'', and another one reads ``when someone forces me to do something, I feel like doing the opposite''. To record the answers, we use a 5-point Likert Scale with higher (lower) values indicating stronger agreement (disagreement).
Importantly, to avoid spillovers between survey responses and behavior, we collect the survey data two weeks before the experiment. The procedure of survey data collection will be as follows. Several days before the collection of the expermental data, the subjects who will have registered for the experiment will receive an invitation to take part in an online survey. Participants will have 48 hours to answer the questionnaire, and we will remind subjects who have not completed the survey a few hours before the deadline. Answering the online survey will take about five minutes. Participants receive a fixed payoff of 2 Euro for taking part.