Presented By: Department of Economics
LYING AND DECEPTION IN REPUTATION BUILDING
Wooyoung Lim, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

This paper examines reputation building with repeated communication in a two-dimensional belief domain, identifying two environments where truth-telling (lying) in one dimension corresponds to deception (non-deception) in the other dimension. In one environment, a sender must tell the truth to conceal her misaligned preference with a receiver, while in the other, she must lie to reveal her aligned preference. A significant portion of senders in our experiments refrain from engaging in reputation-building despite material incentives. This departure from equilibrium behavior is influenced by both inference errors and preferences to avoid lying or deception, with the latter being the primary driver.