CTESS Seminar

Thursday, April 3, 2025

12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location to be announced

The Anatomy of Honesty: Lying Aversion vs. Deception Aversion

Wooyoung Lim, Associate Professor and Lee Heng Fellow, Department of Economics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,

Abstract: This paper experimentally dissects the preferences for honesty into two components: lying aversion and deception aversion. For a separate identification, we consider two reputation-building environments with a two-dimensional belief domain, where lying without deception occurs in one environment and deception without lying occurs in the other environment as a unique equilibrium phenomenon. The choice data collected in the lab enable us to differentiate between individuals' aversion to making statements that are literally untrue (lying aversion) and their aversion to statements intended to manipulate others' beliefs (deception aversion), controlling for inference errors.

Written with Syngjoo Choi (Seoul National University) and Chanjoo Lee (Stanford GSB).

This seminar is sponsored by the Center for Theoretical and Experimental Social Sciences (CTESS), which is part of The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences.

For more information, please contact Letty Diaz by phone at 626-395-1255 or by email at letty.diaz@caltech.edu.

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