Evasive lying in strategic communication

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. 18 January 2017 Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractInformation asymmetries in economic transactions are omnipresent and a regular source of fraudulent behavior. In a theoretical and an experimental analysis of a sender-receiver game we investigate whether sanctions for lying induce more truthtelling. The novel aspect in our model is that senders may not only choose between truth-telling and (explicit) lying, but may also engage in evasive lying by credibly pretending not to know. While we find that sanctions promote truth-telling when senders cannot engage in evasive lying, this is no longer true when evasive lying is possible. Then, explicit lying is largely substituted by evasive lying, which completely eliminates the otherwise positive effect of sanctions on the rate of truthtelling. As outlined in our model, the necessary prerequisite for such an 'erosion' effect is that evasive lying is perceived as sufficiently less psychologically costly than direct lying. Our results clearly demonstrate the limitations of sanctioning lying to counteract the exploitation of informational asymmetries and may explain the empirical evidence from the finance industry that sanctions for financial misconduct eventually appear to be not very efficient.

Evasion of guilt in expert advice

“…Second, the main aim of our analysis is to disentangle the e¤ects stemming purely from belief-driven communication costs, which motivates having such costs as the only source of informativeness of communication in our model. 17 See Khalmetski et al (2017) where this property of the receiver's investment is explicitly incorporated into the analysis in a similar setting.…”

“…Examples include academic communication (Metsä-Ketelä 2012), doctor-patient interactions(Adolphs et al 2007), or corporate annual reports(Guo et al 2017). See alsoSerra-Garcia et al (2011) andKhalmetski et al (2017) for experimental evidence that senders indeed tend to use evasive and vague messages as a substitute for explicit lying.…”

Communication-Enhancing Vagueness

“…A second pair of experimental papers investigated how senders use vague or evasive language in simpler two-state strategic information transmission settings [25,26]. These found that deception through evasive messages such as feigning ignorance is less psychologically costly than deception through direct lies.…”

Malleable Lies: Communication and Cooperation in a High Stakes TV Game Show

“…Earlier studies providing support for the idea that people want to avoid blatant lies when they try to mislead others include Serra-Garcia et al (2011) and Khalmetski et al (2017). Serra-Garcia et al find that people rather deceive by means of a vague message that captures the truth.…”