Tacit collusion in the lab: a Double Cheating Experiment
The Head of the Laboratory Alexis Belianin presented some results of the ongoing experiment on double cheating tentatively called "Tacit collusion in the lab: a Double Cheating Experiment" on the Neuroeconomic workshop on April 19.
Experiments on cheating have been known for quite some time, and are an important tool to study honesty in global populations using small-scale, but real stakes. We present an extension to this experiment to two players who may (or may not) tacitly collude to cheat. The experiment combines an investment game by Berg e.a., (1982) and dice game by Fischbacher and Follmi-Heusi (2014): the first player (Proposer) chooses the share of a fixed pie to be transferred to the second player (Responder) who throws a dice to determine the rate of return on the amount she has just received. At first instance, Responder alone can observe the outcome of this game, and then decide how much to return to the Proposer. Finally, Proposer may either accept this amount or check the decision of Responder, in which case he has to divide the pie equally between the two players, who remain separated by a nontransparent curtain throughout the game.
Results of this experiment conducted in Moscow in 2018 show that most of the players jointly behave honestly, although the share of cheating players remains non-negligible. Implications for further theoretical and empirical work shall be presented and discussed.