Milton Friedman has famously claimed that the responsibility of a manager who is not the owner of a firm is "to conduct the business in accordance with their [the shareholders'] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible." In this paper we argue that when contracts are...

This paper studies lying. An agent randomly picks a number from a known distribution. She can then report any number and receive a monetary payoff based only on her report. The paper presents a model of lying costs that generates hypotheses regarding behavior. In an experiment, we find that the...

This paper studies lying in a simple framework. An agent first randomly picks a number from a known distribution. She can then claim to have observed any number from the set, receiving a monetary payoff based only on her report. Consistent with previous findings, our participants do not...

I compare lying behavior in a real-effort task in which participants have control over outcomes and a task in which outcomes are determined by pure luck. Participants lie significantly more in the random-draw task than in the real-effort task, leading to the conclusion lying about luck is...

The extensive economics literature on lying has focused nearly exclusively on studying experimental settings where individuals can lie for financial rewards. However, in everyday interactions, lying to enhance one’s social- and self-image is ubiquitous and perhaps even more common than lying...