Welcome to my homepage! I am Daniel Parra

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Business Administration, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. I obtained my Ph.D. at the Berlin School of Economics.
My research focuses on people's dishonesty. I am particularly interested in understanding the willingness to lie and be corrupt/act corruptly. In my research, I have mainly used online and lab experiments.

@Danielf_Parra

daniel.parra.carreno[at]gmail[dot]com

Location

Bogotá, Colombia

Nationality

Colombian

Research

published and unpublished papers

Job Market Paper

The impact of lying aversion and prosociality on cheating

People prefer not to lie, but benefiting others makes it easier.

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Abstract

In some situations, when an agent faces the decision of whether to lie or not, their decision only affects the agent themselves. However, in other situations, lying can also benefit third parties as well as the liar. In these latter situations, there is a trade-off between the disutility of being a liar and the utility of a prosocial lie. This paper studies the interaction of two behavioral traits that are well established in the behavioral economics literature: the aversion to lying and prosociality. I first present a model that incorporates heterogeneous lying costs and prosociality as a part of the individual’s preferences. I show that individuals are more likely to lie when they have prosocial motives in addition to their self-interested motives. Using online experiments, I show that participants are more dishonest when their lies benefit others and themselves. More importantly, I present evidence that, on average, the prosocial motive facilitates lying even for people with relatively high lying costs.

Publications

Eliciting dishonesty in online experiments: The observed vs. mind cheating game

Journal of Economic Psychology. 2024.

Published Paper

Abstract

In this paper, I compare two ways of eliciting cheating behavior in online experiments. I present data from two online experiments, one in which participants’ random drawing took place directly on their screens (Observed-Cheating Game) and another in which participants chose a color in their minds and then randomly drew a color from ten boxes with question marks presented on their screens (Mind-Cheating Game). The paper shows that observed online games are more likely to have non-significant treatment differences because the effect of observability is particularly strong. I show that using mind games to generate random draws in online settings solves the most prominent problems for eliciting lying by making the lies unidentifiable at the individual level. The Mind-Cheating Game used in the experiment is inspired by previous mind games and is specifically adapted to be easily implemented in online or field experiments.

Observability and lying

With Tilman Fries, Uri Gneezy, and Agne Kajackaite. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 2021.

Media coverage: Psychology Today.

Published Paper

Abstract

Experimental participants in a cheating game draw a random number and then report any number they wish, receiving a monetary payoff based only on the report. We study how these reports depend on the level of observability of both the random draw and the report by the experimenter. Our results show that whereas increasing the observability of the random draw decreases cheating, increasing the anonymity of the reports does not affect average reports.

Because I (don't) deserve it: Entitlement and lying behavior

With Tilman Fries. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 2021.

Working Paper Published Paper Short Summary

Abstract

We study the effect of entitlement on the willingness to lie. We set up a model of lying where individuals feel more or less entitled to their endowment depending on how they earned it. When given the opportunity to lie to keep their endowment, individuals who feel more entitled are encouraged to lie while others are discouraged. To test the model predictions we use a laboratory experiment where we compare the lying behavior of participants endowed with a high endowment and participants endowed with a low endowment. In one treatment, the allocation of the endowment is decided by participants’ performance, and in the other, it is determined by a random draw. Our study shows that deservingness influences lying in an intuitive direction: when participants performance determines income, those who earn less money lie less than those who earn more. We do not find differences in lying when participants perform the same task but lie to keep windfall endowments.

The limits of transparency in reducing corruption

With Manuel Muñoz-Herrera and Luis Palacio. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. 2021.

Working Paper Published Paper

Abstract

Does transparency, understood as information precision on budget size, deter embezzlement and bribery when they co-occur? We use a laboratory experiment to study the impact of transparency on reducing corruption in these contexts. Our results show that transparency decreases embezzlement while it has no significant effect on bribery. One potential explanation of the observed differential impact of transparency is that resource managers are strategically using the uncertainty on the available budget in their favor. In the experiment, participants in the resource manager role act as if low public investment rates were a consequence of bad luck (low budget) instead of misappropriation. Specifically, embezzlement decreases with high transparency, while bribes remain unaffected. This result suggests that the impact of transparency is not similar on all types of corruption when different types co-occur.

The role of suggestions and tips in distorting a third party's decision

Games. March 2020.

Published Paper

Abstract

I analyze the impact of suggestive advice messages and tipping on a third party’s judgment. The experimental design is based on a model with three players, wherein two players create, by an investment of resources and effort, a joint pie, and the third player must decide how much of the pie to allocate to each of the first two players. To assess the impact of suggestive messages and tips, I use a baseline treatment in which there is no way of influencing the decision-maker. Thus, if the treatments’ manipulations are unable to bias decision-makers, their decisions should be the same as those made under the baseline conditions. The main finding is that the possibility of an ex-post monetary gift (tip) increases the value allocated to a player who may tip the decision-maker in comparison with a context-free of influence. Conversely, suggestive messages do not have this effect, and can even reduce the value allocated to the sender.