Promises and conventions – An approach to pre-play agreements

Selection vs. accountability: An experimental investigation of campaign promises in a moral-hazard environment

“…We note that cheap talk is not necessarily cheap under certain non-standard preferences such as an aversion to lying. Some theorists have modelled electoral lying as an activity that is psychologically costly (Banks, 1990;Callander and Wilkie, 2007), paralleling a corresponding theoretical literature in general strategic environments (e.g., Ellingsen and Johannesson, 2004;Hurkens and Kartik, 2009;Kartik, 2009;López-Pérez, 2012;Miettinen, 2013), and in contrast to the traditional approach to campaign promises in the economics literature exemplified by Barro (1973), where they are considered to be ineffective. There is also a growing experimental literature looking at individuals' aversion to lying (Gneezy, 2005;Vorsatz, 2007, 2009;Lundquist et al, 2009;López-Pérez and Spiegelman, 2013), though it should be noted that some experiments find lying to be rampant (Wilson and Sell, 1997;Duffy and Feltovich, 2002).…”

LYING ABOUT WHAT YOUKNOWOR ABOUT WHAT YOUDO?

“…A second potential explanation is based on the assumption that the informed player may have a taste for keeping her word. Ellingsen and Johannesson (2004) and Miettinen (2008) proposed models in which players suffer a disutility if they do not act as they announced or promised to do, and Vanberg (2008) provided evidence that people have a preference for keeping promises per se.…”

Honesty and informal agreements

“…Our paper shares the focus on informal agreements in underlying game with the pioneering work by Miettinen (2006Miettinen ( , 2013. He examines which deals players will honor if they have "costs of breaking agreements" (and he derives results that hinge on whether or not actions are strategic complements.…”

“…Such honesty may have multiple psychological foundations, like a preference to keep promises or (more generally) not to have lied (e.g., Gneezy, 2005;Demichelis and Weibull, 2008;Vanberg, 2008;Kartik, 2009), obeying some social norm that one should honor agreements (e.g., Malhotra and Murnighan, 2002;Miettinen, 2006Miettinen, , 2013Kessler and Leider, 2012), or guilt aversion (e.g., Charness and Dufwenberg, 2006;Battigalli and Dufwenberg, 2007) such that they live up to others' expectations as shaped through negotiations. One may additionally conceive ways to back up honesty via concerns of identity (e.g., Akerlof and Kranton, 2000) or maintenance of self-esteem (e.g., Benabou and Tirole, 2002).…”