The Network for Integrated Behavioural Science  
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Daniel Read and Despoina Alempaki (Warwick) presented, "Evasive Communication" at a CeDEx Brown Bag, in Nottingham on Thursday 6 December 2018.  Brown Bag seminars are designed for PhD students and faculty to share work in progress for discussion about the planned research experiments.  Also present for the discussion was Valeria Burdea (Pittsburgh), who's a collaborator on the project. 

The proposed research aims to investigate the nature of lying.  When a financial advisor reports on the risks of a financial product to a potential investor, or an expert salesperson describes the qualities of their product to an inexperienced consumer this is an informational asymmetry.  These can open the door to different types of misbehaviours that can have severe economic consequences and create market inefficiencies.  Existing evidence suggests deceptive behaviours are widespread, with the consumer bearing the cost, for example one study (Wolinksy 1993; 1995) revealed that more than half of auto repairs are unnecessary.  However other research reveals that people lie surprisingly little, so how can these pieces of evidence be reconciled?

Despoina went on to present this work in March 2019 at the Winter School (University of Innsbruck) "Credence goods, Incentives and Behavior" and the Workshop "(Un)Ethical behavior in markets".

This experiments for this project were funded by the NIBS small grant scheme.

The results were presented by Despoina at:

  • NIBS September Workshop (18 to 20 September 2019) at the University of Warwick
  • DR@W forum in Warwick on 24 October 2019
  • Workshop on Behavioural and Experimental Economics (November 2019) Ningbo China
  • University of Portsmouth (November 2019)
  • WZB Berlin (November 2019)
  • Vienna Center for Experimental Economics (November 2020)

There are plans to write a paper for publication.    

  • Despoina Alempaki was a NIBS funded PhD student with NIBS 1 and is currently a Research Fellow at Warwick Business School. 
  • Valeria Burdea is a former Nottingham CeDEx PhD student, currently working as a Research Fellow at the University of Pittsburg.
  • Daniel Read has been a NIBS funded Co-Investigator since 2012.
Posted on Thursday 6th December 2018

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