Misreporting in teams with individual decision making: The impact of information and communication

Abstract

We extend the experimental analysis of misreporting performance in real effort tasks (cheating) to situations where two members of a team perform the task sequentially and decide independently on their potentially inflated reports. We vary three factors in our experiment: whether no players, only players 2, or both players can misreport; whether players 2 learn the report of players 1; and whether players 1 can send a message to players 2 requesting honest or dishonest behavior. Our data yield two main insights. First, higher reports by players 1 lead to higher reports by players 2, i.e. misreporting is reinforcing. Second, allowing players 1 to send a message suggesting that players 2 either report honestly or a minimum number of correct solutions reduces misreporting by players 2. There are two channels for this. First, most players 1 request an honest report. Second, players 2 misreport far less when they receive the honest message, but, compared to the treatments without messages, hardly change their reports when they are asked to report a minimum number of correct solutions. We find a similar, though less pronounced, asymmetric response when players 2 learn the reports of players 1. These findings suggest that communication and information transmission can reduce cheating, and that there are notable spillover effects of honesty even in anonymous environments.