Lying Behavior when Payoffs are Shared with Charity: Experimental Evidence

Abstract

We investigate lying behavior when lying is undetectable and payoffs are split with charity. 524 participants roll a die in private, report the outcome, and receive the monetary equivalent of their reported number, i.e., there is a clear incentive to lie. Participants are randomly assigned to share all, some, or none of this payoff with a charity of their choice. This allows us to examine how lying behavior changes with the share of payoffs going to charity. Our results are as follows: (i) there are participants in every group who lie to inflate their reported number; (ii) overall lying behavior is significant for all groups, except that in which participants keep none of the payoff; and (iii) post-experiment surveys reveal that participants who keep the whole payoff are much less likely to admit to having cheated than all other participants. Finally, our data suggests that lying is not correlated with any observable sociodemographic characteristic.