Recent experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We use experiments as well to study the socio-demographic covariates of such lie aversion, and find gender and religiosity to be without predictive value. However, subjects’ major is...

This paper reports on an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: pecuniary and non-pecuniary as well as their mutual interaction. Our data provide evidence that both mechanisms significantly enhance trust in comparison to the standard investment...

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

We analyze the effects of introducing asymmetric information andexpectations in the investment game (Berg et al., 1995). In our experiment,only the trustee knows the size of the surplus. Subjects’expectations about each other’s behavior are also elicited. Our resultsshow that average payback...

We study the impact of advice or observation on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Both sources of information trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. Yet, we find that subjects who receive naive advice outperform uninformed subjects permanently, whereas...