TY - JOUR
T1 - Context-dependent cheating
T2 - Experimental evidence from 16 countries
AU - Pascual-Ezama, David
AU - Fosgaard, Toke R.
AU - Cardenas, Juan Camilo
AU - Kujal, Praveen
AU - Veszteg, Robert
AU - Gil-Gómez de Liaño, Beatriz
AU - Gunia, Brian
AU - Weichselbaumer, Doris
AU - Hilken, Katharina
AU - Antinyan, Armenak
AU - Delnoij, Joyce
AU - Proestakis, Antonios
AU - Tira, Michael D.
AU - Pratomo, Yulius
AU - Jaber-López, Tarek
AU - Brañas-Garza, Pablo
N1 - Funding Information:
Financial support from the following: Ministry of Science from Spain : ECO2013-44879-R and Junta de Andalucia Excelllent Groups P12-SEJ-1436 (Spain) .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 The Authors.
PY - 2015/8/1
Y1 - 2015/8/1
N2 - Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across 16 countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.
AB - Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across 16 countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.
KW - Corruption
KW - Cultural differences
KW - Honesty
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.04.020
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.04.020
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84934877359
SN - 0167-2681
VL - 116
SP - 379
EP - 386
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
ER -