February 2025
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2 Reads
The Leadership Quarterly
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Publications (34)
October 2024
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268 Reads
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3 Citations
Nature Human Behaviour
Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a megastudy involving 21,506 UK and US participants from Prolific.com who played an incentivized tax evasion game online. Of the 21 interventions, 10 significantly improved tax compliance by 4.5 to 8.5 percentage points, with the most successful nearly halving tax evasion. Limited evidence for moderators was found. Experts and laypeople failed to predict the most effective interventions, though experts’ predictions were more accurate. In conclusion, honesty oaths were effective in curbing dishonesty, but their effectiveness varied depending on content. These findings can help design impactful interventions to curb dishonesty.
June 2024
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655 Reads
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1 Citation
Dishonest behaviors such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex-ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as useful interventions to counteract dishonest behavior, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated, and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a megastudy in which 21,506 UK and US participants played an incentivized tax evasion game. Of the 21 interventions, 10 significantly improved tax compliance by 4.5 to 8.5 percentage points, with the most successful nearly halving tax evasion. Limited evidence for moderators was found. Experts and laypeople failed to predict the most effective interventions, but experts’ predictions were more accurate. In conclusion, honesty oaths can be effective in curbing dishonesty but their effectiveness varies depending on content. These findings can help design impactful interventions to curb dishonesty.
January 2024
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3 Reads
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13 Citations
Journal of Political Economy
January 2024
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1 Read
January 2024
January 2024
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9 Reads
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2 Citations
SSRN Electronic Journal
November 2023
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19 Reads
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6 Citations
Games and Economic Behavior
August 2023
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9 Reads
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4 Citations
European Economic Review
![Fig. 1. Forest plot of meta-analytic results. (A) Plotted are the point estimates and the 95% CIs of the effect sizes in the 45 experimental designs and a random-effects meta-analysis for analytic approach A (in Cohen’s d units). There is statistically significant evidence (P < 0.005) of a negative effect of competition on moral behavior in four of the individual designs and suggestive evidence (P < 0.05) in four additional designs, and there is statistically significant evidence (P < 0.005) of a positive effect of competition on moral behavior in one of the individual designs and suggestive evidence (P < 0.05) in one additional design. There is suggestive evidence of an adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in the meta-analysis (d = −0.085, 95% CI [−0.147, −0.022], P = 0.008). (B) Plotted are the point estimates and the 95% CIs of the effect sizes in the 45 experimental designs and a random-effects meta-analysis for analytic approach B (in Cohen’s d units). There is statistically significant evidence (P < 0.005) of a negative effect of competition on moral behavior in four of the individual designs and suggestive evidence (P < 0.05) in three additional designs, and there is statistically significant evidence (P < 0.005) of a positive effect of competition on moral behavior in one of the individual designs and suggestive evidence (P < 0.05) in one additional design. There is statistically significant evidence of an adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in the meta-analysis (d = −0.086, 95% CI [−0.144, −0.027], P = 0.004).](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johannes-Doerflinger/publication/371158906/figure/fig4/AS:11431281163051990@1685473918171/Forest-plot-of-meta-analytic-results-A-Plotted-are-the-point-estimates-and-the-95-CIs_Q320.jpg)
![Fig. 4. Illustration of the importance of experimental design heterogeneity. Plotted is the normal density function of the effect size distribution and the associated 95% CI of conducting a single-design study randomly drawn from the 45 experimental designs (for analytic approach B, isolating design heterogeneity). The mean of the density function is equal to the (equally weighted) mean of the 45 designs m = −0.085, and the variance of the density function is defined as the estimated design heterogeneity (τ2 = 0.028) plus the average sampling variance (σ2 = 0.012) of the 45 experimental designs. The 95% CI is [−0.477, 0.308], illustrating that single-design studies yield imprecise estimates if the estimated design heterogeneity is incorporated. Plotted is also the normal density function and the 95% CI based on only the design heterogeneity (τ2), providing a lower bound of the confidence interval when the sampling variance (sample size) goes to zero (infinity), illustrating that also this lower bound results in a wide confidence interval of [−0.415, 0.246]. The intervals in Fig. 4 were not preregistered and should not be interpreted as hypothesis tests, but only as an illustration of the importance of design heterogeneity.](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johannes-Doerflinger/publication/371158906/figure/fig5/AS:11431281163051996@1685473977674/llustration-of-the-importance-of-experimental-design-heterogeneity-Plotted-is-the_Q320.jpg)
May 2023
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596 Reads
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17 Citations
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity-variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity-estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs-indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis. competition | moral behavior | metascience | generalizability | experimental design
Citations (23)
... First, considering the potential to report up to 12 successful guesses, whereas the expected number under perfect honesty is 2 and the actual mean number in the pooled sample is 5.97, 0.5 guesses is subjectively considered a reasonable SESOI. Alternatively, a recent, large-scale study of honest behavior used a SESOI of Cohen's d =.075, which in our data represents 0.2622 guesses (Zickfeld et al. 2024 To present the results of study 5 graphically, the three measures of honesty (no. there is no association between individual honest behavior and PSM in these data (controlling for experimental condition and country fixed effects) (see Supplementary Table 13 for details), nor between collaborative honest behavior and PSM (Supplementary Table 14). ...
- Citing Article
- Publisher preview available
October 2024
Nature Human Behaviour
... We will look at the recent paper from Cordes et al. (2024) called Motivated Procrastination. The authors investigate why people sometimes delay tasks despite understanding the costs. ...
Reference:
My Statistics is Better than Yours
- Citing Article
January 2024
SSRN Electronic Journal
... Les expériences en laboratoire permettent d'appor ter une réponse plus affirmative à cette question. Un certain nombre de travaux (Zickfeld et al., 2024 ;Jacquemet et al., 2020) confirment en effet l'efficacité d'une forme particulière d'engagement, qui prend concrètement la forme d'un serment sur l'honneur à dire la vérité. En matière de fraude fiscale, un tel serment conduit à une augmentation massive, de l'ordre de 50 %, du montant d'impôt collecté. ...
- Citing Preprint
- File available
June 2024
... For related papers on the value of leaders, seeEnglmaier et al. (2024),Friebel et al. (2022), andLazear et al. (2015).3 While we show that the manager's visits boost branch productivity, we do not compare the return on management time of MBWA to that of other managerial activities, nor do we systematically analyze the contingencies that magnify or mute the effectiveness of MBWA.Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
- Citing Article
January 2024
Journal of Political Economy
... However, a field study in Guatemala found no effect of the pledge on tax reporting (Kettle et al., 2017). Similarly, a field study using a no-cheating pledge before an exam also found no effect on student honesty (Cagala et al., 2024). ...
- Citing Article
November 2023
Games and Economic Behavior
... We believe it is important to explore this situational context for three main reasons. First, the choice of specific reporting methods is crucial to unravel the occurrence of fraudulent behaviors, because the probability of detecting fraud-or cheating more broadly-is endogenous to the method used to report a given outcome (Kleven et al. 2011;Rosaz and Villeval 2012;Gill et al. 2013;Behnk et al. 2019;Feltovich 2019;Santoro 2021;Vranka et al. 2021;Amore et al. 2023;Lang and Schudy 2023;Cagala et al. 2024). Second, as highlighted by Huber and Huber (2020), dishonesty in the financial industry often generates greater economic consequences-e.g., corporate fraud, insider trading, etc.-than cheating in more "innocuous" settings. ...
- Citing Article
August 2023
European Economic Review
... Similarly, in the recent crowd-sourced project on competition and moral behavior 17 , among the 17 experiments that investigated whether people cheat more for monetary incentives in competitive environments, 12 experimental designs (71%) either confounded the effects of competition and uncertainty (i.e., directly compared a certain non-competitive incentive scheme with an uncertain competitive scheme) or failed to control for the expected value of incentives across competitive and non-competitive conditions. In the other five designs (29%), the level of uncertainty was the same across the competitive and non-competitive conditions, but the lack of the crucial third condition in these designs (i.e., the certain non-competitive incentive) made it impossible to study the effects of competition and uncertainty at the same time. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
May 2023
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
... Kagel (1995) explores learning transfer between first-price and English auctions. In this issue, Giebe et al., (2023) study learning transfer between first-price auctions and second-price auctions, a type of auction where overbidding has been well documented (this was first reported in 1987). The paper shows that for people in the bottom half of the cognitive ability measure, participating first in a first-price auction reduces overbidding in a subsequent secondprice auction. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
March 2023
Experimental Economics
... Anticipated regret that audiences may expect to experience if they miss out on a purchase, has been studied in the context of consumer behavior (Guan et al., 2023). If an individual expects to feel regret over a purchase decision, their decision is evaluated more carefully (Huang and Suo, 2021) exhibiting risk aversion (Klimm et al., 2023;Bonanno, 2022;Palminteri et al., 2023). Generally, people tend to make purchase decisions to minimize regret regardless of being risk taker or averse . ...
- Citing Article
February 2023
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
... Long-standing empirical and experimental evidence would suggest a qualified yes: people follow norms, even when their violation is not observed, unlikely to be sanctioned, and profitable for the decision-maker (e.g., Bicchieri 2005; Weber 2009, 2013;Banerjee 2016;Barr et al. 2018;Lynn 2018;d'Adda et al. 2020;Govindan 2022; te Velde and Louis 2022; Krupka et al. 2022; Bartling and Özdemir 2023;Eckel et al. 2023). 1 However, the existence of a social norm in itself does not automatically imply that individuals will abide by it. Recent empirical evidence has revealed that in some settings norms have little or no influence at all on individual behavior, leading to problematic norm-behavior inconsistencies (Morris et al. 2015;Gächter et al. 2017;Grimm 2019;Traub et al. 2023). 2 This is especially true when it comes to illegal or morally questionable decisions, e.g., earnings manipulations, tax evasion, and bribery, to name a few (Kocher et al. 2018;Fochmann et al. 2021;Aycinena et al. 2022;Feess et al. 2023). For example, Huber and Huber (2020) reveal that observed variations in dishonest financial reports can only be partly attributed to differences in social norms; and Guerra and Zhuravleva (2021) show that the predominant social norm against bribery does not align with observed bribing behavior. ...
- Citing Article
January 2016
SSRN Electronic Journal