Humans often lie strategically. We study this problem in an ultimatum game involving informed proposers and uninformed responders, where the former can send an unverifiable statement about their endowment. If there are some intrinsically honest proposers, a simple message game shows that the rest of them are likely to declare a lower-than-actual endowment to the responders. In the second part of the paper, we report on an experiment testing this game. On average, 88.5% of the proposers understate the actual endowment by 20.5%. Regression analysis shows that a one-dollar gap between the actual and declared amounts prompts proposers to reduce their offer by 19 cents. However, responders appear not to take such claims seriously, and thus the frequency of rejections should increase. The consequence is a net welfare loss, that is specific to such a "free-to-lie" environment.
Criticism is mounting on business schools for their excessive focus on research and for neglecting teaching. We show that if students have imperfect information about a school's overall capabilities and if business schools differ in their research productivity, the least productive schools may do as much research as the top-tier ones only to manipulate students' expectations. In turn, the most productive schools might resort to excess research in order to signal their type in the eyes of future students. This signaling equilibrium is characterized by a relative neglect of teaching by the top-tier schools. Such a situation is socially inefficient as compared to the perfect information case.
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