Dishonesty in Complex Environments: Deliberate Lies, Short-Cuts, or Accidental Mistakes? 

30 Pages Posted: 19 Dec 2024 Last revised: 9 Jan 2025

See all articles by Pascal Nieder

Pascal Nieder

Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance

Sven A. Simon

Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance

Date Written: December 19, 2024

Abstract

This paper studies how and why complexity affects dishonest reporting behavior. While compliance with complex reporting standards can be challenging and may lead to accidental mistakes, complexity can also enable systematic self-serving dishonesty. Our experiment disentangles these two causes of non-compliance. Causal identification relies on varying complexity in two distinct regimes: (i) a reporting task, in which subjects have a financial incentive to dishonestly inflate their reports; and (ii) an accuracy task, in which subjects are paid to produce factually correct reports. We find three main results: First, complexity significantly increases the number of factually incorrect reports. Second, complexity leads to more honest errors, but also to a pronounced dishonesty shift. Complexity increases the proportion of intentional lies by 60%. Third, we identify two mechanisms of this dishonesty shift. Individuals with strong social-image concerns have lower lying costs under complexity, because they can plausibly claim to have made honest mistakes. And in addition, some individuals take shortcuts and avoid the compliance costs of complexity altogether just to make self-serving but potentially dishonest reports.

Keywords: Dishonest behavior, Complexity, Lying, Non-Compliance, Experiment

JEL Classification: C91, D90, K42, H26

Suggested Citation

Nieder, Pascal and Simon, Sven A., Dishonesty in Complex Environments: Deliberate Lies, Short-Cuts, or Accidental Mistakes?  (December 19, 2024). Working Paper of the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance No. 2024-17, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5064242 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5064242

Pascal Nieder

Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance ( email )

Sven A. Simon (Contact Author)

Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance ( email )

Marstallplatz 1
Munich, 80539
Germany

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