Deception Through Telling the Truth?! Experimental Evidence from Individuals and Teams

Abstract

Informational asymmetries abound in economic decision making and often provide an incentive for deception through telling a lie or misrepresenting information. In this article I use a cheap-talk sender-receiver experiment to show that telling the truth should be classified as deception too if the sender chooses the true message with the expectation that the receiver will not follow the sender's (true) message. The experimental data reveal a large degree of 'sophisticated' deception through telling the truth. The robustness of my broader definition of deception is confirmed in an experimental treatment where teams make decisions. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2009.