European Business Schools Librarian's Group

ESSEC Working Papers,
ESSEC Research Center, ESSEC Business School

No WP2006: Profession and deception: Experimental evidence on lying behavior among business and medical students

Damien Besancenot () and Radu Vranceanu ()
Additional contact information
Damien Besancenot: Université de Paris Descartes
Radu Vranceanu: ESSEC Research Center, ESSEC Business School, Postal: ESSEC Research Center, BP 105, 95021 Cergy, France

Abstract: This paper reports data from a sender-receiver experiment that compares lying behavior between two groups of students, one in business administration and the other in medicine. We use a modified version of the sender-receiver deception game introduced by Erat and Gneezy (2012) to collect data on 393 subjects. The results show that both groups of students respond to incentives as expected: the frequency of lying is higher, the higher the benefit for the sender, and the lower the loss for the receiver is. For given payoffs, there is little difference between the two groups in the domain of white lies; however, business students resort to selfish lies more frequently than do medical students. Furthermore, the analysis does not confirm differences in altruism between the two groups

Keywords: Lies; deception; communication; medicine; business administration; survey data

JEL-codes: C91; D83; I19

37 pages, September 11, 2020

Note: This is the preprint version of the paper published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2020, with DOI.ORG/10.1016/j.jebo.2020.08.47

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