Trabajo publicado como artículo con el titulo: "Would I lie to you? On social preferences and lying aversion" en Experimental Economics 12(2): 180-192 (2009).-- http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-008-9208-2
This paper reconsiders the evidence on lying or deception presented in Gneezy (2005,
American Economic Review). We argue that Gneezy's data cannot reject the hypothesis
that people are one of two kinds: either a person will never lie, or a person will lie whenever
she prefers the outcome obtained by lying over the outcome obtained by telling the truth. This
implies that so long as lying induces a preferred outcome over truth-telling, a person's decision
of whether to lie may be completely insensitive to other changes in the induced outcomes, such
as exactly how much she monetarily gains relative to how much she hurts an anonymous partner.
We run new but similar experiments to those of Gneezy in order to test this hypothesis. We find
that our data cannot reject this hypothesis either, but we also discover substantial diferences
in behavior between our subjects and Gneezy's subjects.