Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?

Abstract

In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard. The MBA Oath and the Dutch Bankers Oath are examples of such a commitment device. The question we test herein is whether the oath can be used as an effective form of ethics management for future executives/managers—who for our experiment we recruited from a leading French business school—by actually improving their honesty. Using a classic Sender-Receiver strategic game experiment, we reinforce professional identity by pre-selecting the group to which Receivers belong. This allows us to determine whether taking the oath deters lying among future managers. Our results suggest “yes and no.” We observe that these future executives/managers who took a solemn honesty oath as a Sender were (a) significantly more likely to tell the truth when the lie was detrimental to the Receiver, but (b) were not more likely to tell the truth when the lie was mutually beneficial to both the Sender and Receiver. A joint product of our design is our ability to measure in-group bias in lying behavior in our population of subjects (comparing behavior of subjects in the same and different business schools). The experiment provides clear evidence of a lack of such bias.

Effectiveness of Ex-Ante Honesty Oaths in Reducing Dishonesty Depends on Content

“…Nevertheless, our insights can be important for designing interventions in such applied settings. Similarly, previous studies have shown that honesty oaths can be effective across a range of outcome behaviors including dishonesty in economic game tasks, [58][59][60][61] preference elicitation, 62,63 tax compliance, 22 and cheating in online exams. 64 Our study replicates this general finding and provides an overview of boundary conditions and effective formulations.…”

Show no quarter: combating plausible lies with ex-ante honesty oaths

“…Despite the merits of remote settings, many workers are left unmonitored, leading to costly agency problems involving misreporting —the worker executes the task but lies about quality, productivity, performance, or outcome—and shirking —the worker minimizes effort and fails to complete the task at all, yet seeks compensation. Lying in strategic and nonstrategic settings is well documented in the lab and in online experiments (e.g., Beck et al, 2018 ; Erat & Gneezy, 2012 ; Fischbacher & Follmi-Heusi, 2013 ; Gneezy et al, 2018 ; Jacquemet et al, 2018 , 2019 , 2021b ; Rosaz & Villeval, 2012 ; Tergiman & Villeval, 2021 ) and is typically viewed as deviant behavior involving a trade-off between psychological costs and unethical benefits (e.g., Abeler et al, 2014 ; Becker, 1968 ; Brink et al, 2019 ). Because plausible lies are, by their nature, the most difficult to detect and extremely common, they are often the costliest.…”