Uncertainty About Winning a Competition, Entitlement, and Lying

Abstract

Winning a competition often creates an entitlement effect, and people perceive it as fair to receive high outcomes. Consequently they have a higher tendency to behave dishonestly to secure the higher outcome. We test whether pure exposure to a competitive environment -without knowing the outcome of the competition- leads to increased lying. Participants do a real-effort task with either low or high piece-rate. Our treatments vary whether the high piece-rate is awarded randomly or based on performance. Subsequently, participants perform a die-under-the-cup task. While on the aggregate, pure exposure to the competitive environment does not increase lying, we find that participants who believe they are on the margin between winning and losing the competition do lie significantly more than participants with similar beliefs in the random treatment.

Keywords: Entitlement, Competition, Lying, Experiment