Abstract:
Are opportunities making thieves? Accumulated experimental evidence shows that, when people have the opportunity to cheat, often they take it. Most of the literature on cheating opportunities forces people into a tempting situation where they face a trade-off between money and morality. In our paper, we ask whether people are sophisticated in their cheating behavior and whether they search for or avoid these trade-offs. Overall, participants in the experiment exhibit very little temptation, i.e., virtually no one is willing to pay a cost to avoid the possibility of misreporting in a coin-flip-like task, and they are able to consistently stick to their plan. Participants with a strict preference for the tempting situation, i.e., who are planning to cheat, show a winning rate of about 95% and those that are indifferent between having and not having the opportunity, i.e., who are planning to be honest, show a winning rate that is close to 50%.
