The impact of agency on misreporting in in an economic laboratory experiment

This project will identify the impact of agency on misreporting in in an economic laboratory experiment. We build upon two prominent lines of literature. On the one hand there is clear evidence for misreporting private information when there is a material incentive for the decision maker, e.g., evading taxes (Allingham and Sandmo 1972), free riding on public goods (Falkinger 1991) or committing crimes crime (Becker1968). Recently there is a growing interest on simple deception games in laboratory settings to identify the “lying-aversion” when detection is virtually impossible (e.g., Fischbacher and Follmy-Heusi 2014). On the other hand there is a recent literature on decisions for others with no incentive for the decision maker (see, e.g., Fuellbrunn and Luhan 2014). As many economically relevant situations involve both, a demand for revealing private information and some form of agency (e.g., Tax counselling, financial investments or custodianship) we need to establish the motivational factors and their impact in situations involving agency and the possibility to misreport private information. We aim to develop a theoretical framework for the context above identifying all possible motivational factors and expected behavioural patterns. In the following laboratory experiment we are going to test and the emerging hypothesis, discriminate behavioural types and identify the models with the highest predictive power. The expected outcome is a publication in a 3* Journal such as the European Economic Review, JEBO or Experimental Economics.