Date of Award
Spring 5-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Behavioral and Computational Economics
First Advisor
Steven Rassenti
Second Advisor
David Porter
Abstract
This paper studies how people behave when honesty, fairness, equality, and self-interest intersect. In a series of coin-flip reporting tasks, participants can misreport a privately observed outcome to change payoffs for themselves and an anonymous partner. Building on prior work on lying aversion and lying-dictator games, the test varies to elicit the discrepancy between lying aversion and equality. Allocations to each player’s material payoff, introduces of equal or unequal treatment and involved and indifferent treatments. Using a simple nonparametric mixture model, there is evidence of cheating in all four tasks, with implied cheating rates of roughly 13 to 25 percent, including in conditions where lying does not increase one’s own earnings but can benefit the partner or alter relative standing. Differences in implied cheating rates across most tasks are consistent with the idea that willingness to lie is sensitive to the structure of incentives, but they do not provide conclusive evidence of systematic “preference switching” between honesty and equality.
DOI
10.36837/chapman.000738
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Lin, M. S. (2026). Motive selection and lying aversion in a coin flip game: An experimental approach to preference switching [Master's thesis, Chapman University]. Chapman University Digital Commons. https://doi.org/10.36837/chapman.000738