Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics
Working Papers,
Lund University, Department of Economics
No 2004:30: Detection Biases in Bluffing - Theory and Experiments
Håkan Holm ()
Additional contact information
Håkan Holm: Department of Economics, Lund University, Postal: Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Box 7082, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden
Abstract: People may be better at recognizing lies than truths or better at recognizing truths than lies. Such detection biases are analyzed theoretically and experimentally. The detection bias shrinks the equilibrium set to a unique non-pooling equilibrium, in which, the better a player is to detect lies the more often will the opponent player lie. In the experiment, subjects were telling the truth too often according to standard predictions. Other findings were a significant positive correlation between self-rated bluffing ability and actual bluffing performance. Furthermore, the subjects were more prone to lie to a woman than to a man.
Keywords: Bluffing; Game theory; Truth detection; Lie detection; Experiment
45 pages, First version: December 22, 2004. Revised: January 19, 2005.
Note: This working paper has been divided into two and replaced by 2008:4 and 2008:5
Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Iker Arregui Alegria ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().
RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2004_030This page generated on 2024-09-13 22:16:09.