Research

We examine whether individuals claim to be incompetent to avoid costly public goods tasks such as non-promotable tasks or household chores -- a behavior widely described as strategic incompetence. Using a laboratory experiment, we exogenously vary the gender stereotype associated with a task (neutral, female, or male) to study its impact on communicated ability and task assignment. We find that individuals consistently claim incompetence and successfully evade task assignment. When tasks are stereotyped, gender gaps in communicated ability emerge over time in stereotype-consistent directions. These gaps are not driven by gender differences in strategic incompetence, but by self-stereotyping: when stereotypes become salient, individuals lower their private self-assessments if their gender is viewed as less competent. Our results underscore the importance of stereotype salience and highlight how communication of incompetence in strategic situations can perpetuate gender disparities by reinforcing unequal task assignment.

While standard models recognize intrinsic costs of lying, they typically focus on individual decision-making, treating reputational concerns as a trade off between the benefits of lying and the probability of detection by a passive observer. Using a strategic communication game in a controlled experiment, we show that honesty oaths shortcircuit this calculus by internalizing the audience, even when the audience is a strategic counterpart whose beliefs and actions determine payoffs. While the oath dramatically increases truth-telling, those who do break their promise systematically avoid brazen, detectable lies, retreating instead to ambiguity. Crucially, this refusal to be a “brazen renegade” is not a strategic reaction to the receiver: it persists even when the oath is private and compliance cannot be traced to the participant by the experimenter. This inelasticity to external scrutiny challenges standard reputational models: instead, our data are consistent with the oath-taker answering to an internal judge rather than an external one. Furthermore, we show that this internal audience does not strictly require the cognitive amnesia or imperfect recall required by standard self-signaling models; rather, it can also be understood as a present-moment, categorical refusal to generate inescapable evidence of one’s own transgression. Finally, we show that receivers intuit this mechanism, pricing in the oath’s “psychological enforceability” by granting credibility only when the speaker has no room to hide. 

Is dishonestly earned money treated more as a windfall gain or as the result of costly effort? We found that in the context of risk taking, individuals treat dishonestly earned money more like a windfall gain from luck than as an effort-based gain. The effect is especially prevalent among risk averse liars. However, increasing the moral cost of lying ex post eliminates the difference between risk taking with dishonest money and with money earned from costly effort. This cannot result from a selection effect in our settings but it suggests that moral costs induce an entitlement effect.