Cheating and money manipulation

We use different incentive schemes to study how subjects cheat when they are asked to reveal a piece of private information. We find no significant evidence of cheating when there is no financial incentive associated with the reports, but cheating does occur when the reports determine financial gains or losses (in different treatments). We find no evidence of increased cheating to avoid a loss in the standard case in which subjects receive their earnings at the end of the session. When subjects manipulate the possible earnings, we find evidence of less cheating in the loss setting. We interpret our findings in terms of the moral cost of cheating and differences in the perceived trust and beliefs in the gain and the loss frames.