We investigate the elasticity of moral ignorance with respect to monetary incentives and social norm information. We propose that individuals suffer from higher moral costs when rejecting a certain donation, and thus pay for moral ignorance. Consistent with our model, we find significant...

Do people anticipate the conditions that enable them to manipulate their beliefs when confronted with unpleasant information? We investigate whether individuals seek out the "cognitive flexibility" needed to distort beliefs in self-serving ways, or instead attempt to constrain it, committing to...

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the...

In cases of conflict of interest, people can lie directly about payoff relevant private information, or they can evade the truth without lying directly. We analyse this situation theoretically and test the key predictions in an experimental sender-receiver setting. We find senders prefer to...

This paper reports results of two controlled experiments on the behavioural effects of relative performance information (RPI) in different organizational structures. Our baseline study 1 focuses on a centralized organizational structure where employees are exogenously assigned to either a...

Economists and management scholars have argued that the scope of incentives to increase cooperation in organizations is limited as their use signals the prevalence of free-riding among employees. This paper tests this hypothesis experimentally, using a sample of managers and employees from a...

The paper studies whether a drought in 1788 affected the outbreak of peasant revolts during the French Revolution. I construct a community-level data set with information on local drought severity and peasant uprisings in 1789. Results indicate that those more affected by the drought more often...

We modify the Acquiring-a-Company game to study lying in ultimatum bargaining. Privately informed sellers send messages about the alleged value of their company to potential buyers. Via random information leaks, buyers can learn the true value before proposing a price which the seller finally...

Can algorithms help people detect deception in high-stakes strategic interactions? Participants watching the pre-play communication of contestants in the TV show Golden Balls display a limited ability to predict contestants' behavior, while algorithms do significantly better. We provide...

We report the results of an experiment on selective exposure to information. A decision maker interested in learning about an uncertain state of the world can acquire information from one of two sources which have opposite biases: when informed on the state, they report it truthfully; when...