We invited "residents" of a virtual world who vary in real-world age and occupation to play a trust game with stakes comparable to "in world" wages. In different treatments, the lab wall was adorned with an emotively suggestive photograph, a suggestive text was added to the instructions, or both...

We invited “residents” of a virtual world who vary in real-world age and occupation to play a trust game with stakes comparable to “in world” wages. In different treatments, the lab wall was adorned with an emotively suggestive photograph, a suggestive text was added to the instructions,...

Informational asymmetries abound in economic decision making and often provide an incentive for deception through telling a lie or misrepresenting information. In this paper I use a cheap-talk sender-receiver experiment to show that telling the truth should be classified as deception too if the...