Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/02/2024
11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Tanjim Hossain, Professor from the University of Toronto, will present to our economics graduate students and faculty on Friday, February 9 in KTH 334!

Tanjim is the Chair of the Department of Management – UTM and is a professor of marketing at the Department of Management – UTM and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He serves as the Director of the Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR) center. His primary research focuses on behavioural economics, applied microeconomics, and quantitative marketing, especially using field and laboratory experiments to test the validity of theoretical predictions in the real world. He will present the paper, “How People Lie in Games: An Experimental Exploration“.

Abstract

We utilize a laboratory experiment with two 2-player dominance-solvable games to quantify how a payoff-irrelevant truth affects player behavior. Players in one of the games have a strictly dominant strategy, thereby simplifying their return calculations. In the other game, there is no dominant strategy, and the returns from lying depend on the co-player’s level of dishonesty. We discover that how much a participant lies, in response to changes in the truth, critically depends on the specific strategic considerations of the game and the participant’s type. Although the game structure does not influence the proportion of participants who are always truthful, it does affect those who deviate from the truth, at least occasionally. Those participants lie less frequently, and the magnitude of their lies is smaller in the game without a dominant strategy. This tendency to tacitly coordinate actions through the truth leads to increases in payoffs, providing evidence that truthfulness can indeed be a strategic decision in economic games.

View Tanjim’s professional website.