Judgment and Decision
Making, vol. 2, no. 1, February 2007, pp. 23-28.
Deception and price in a market with asymmetric
information
Kimmo Eriksson
Department of Mathematics and Physics
Mälardalen University1
Brent Simpson
Department of Sociology
University of South Carolina
Abstract
In markets with asymmetric information, only sellers have knowledge
about the quality of goods. Sellers may of course make a declaration of
the quality, but unless there are sanctions imposed on false
declarations or reputations are at stake, such declarations are
tantamount to cheap talk. Nonetheless, in an experimental study we find
that most people make honest declarations, which is in line with recent
findings that lies damaging another party are costly in terms of the
liar's utility. Moreover, we find in this experimental
market that deceptive sellers offer lower prices than honest sellers,
which could possibly be explained by the same wish to limit the damage
to the other party. However, when the recipient of the offer is a
social tie we find no evidence for lower prices of deceptive offers,
which seems to indicate that the rationale for the lower price in
deceptive offers to strangers is in fact profit-seeking (by making the
deal more attractive) rather than moral.
Keywords: honesty, deception, asymmetric information, price signaling,
social ties
1 Introduction
A market is said to have asymmetric information if only the
sellers know the quality of goods. George Akerlof's (1970) famous
game-theoretic paper on the "market for lemons" showed that,
given certain conditions, good quality would be driven out of
markets with information asymmetries. Experimental studies
support this basic argument (Holt, 1995). The core features of
the traditional market-for-lemons model are quality and prices of
goods. High quality goods are assumed to be more valuable to
sellers and buyers alike, but only sellers know the quality at
the time of sale. In order for any deception to take place,
sellers must also be able to make a quality declaration, true or
false. If no reputation-building or other sanctions are possible,
such declarations are considered cheap talk and are usually
discarded as irrelevant in game theory (e.g., Crawford & Sobel,
1982). In effect, in standard game theory everyone is supposed to
lie if they benefit by doing so.2
The archetypical example of a market-for-lemons is the market for used
cars. However, Uri Gneezy (2005) points out an empirical departure from
the theoretical prediction:
One of the conclusions raised by the lemons model is that only dealers
who can offer a warranty will sell used cars of high quality. This
conclusion is not in line with the real-world coexistence of
professional car dealers and private sellers who sell cars of high
quality without a warranty.
He then suggests that buyers often place sufficient trust in
private sellers' honesty because many private sellers actually
prefer to be honest. Indeed, many experimental studies have found
that most subjects usually do not take advantage of a possibility
to deceive another party (e.g., O'Connor & Carnevale, 1997;
Schweitzer & Croson, 1999; Gneezy, 2005). These studies also
identify several moderators of the decision whether to deceive;
in particular, Gneezy (2005) found that deception is less likely
to occur the more it damages the other party. We will think of
this as a moral cost of deception.
Here we present a novel experimental study of deception and price in a
market for lemons. As far as we know, there has been no previous study
of deceptive declarations of quality in such markets. Our first aim is
to establish that also in this context, most subjects will tend to be
honest. Said differently, we expect most subjects who advertise a
"peach" will actually sell a peach and not
a lemon.
Our second and main aim is to study the relationship between
deception and pricing. In a market where the sellers set the
prices, no gain is made from deception unless the seller actually
charges more for the good when the buyer believes it to be of
high quality. This pricing aspect has no counterpart in Gneezy's
study, where subjects only chose whether to be honest or to
deceive. In our experiment, "gadget" sellers compete for buyers
both with (declared) quality and price. At first glance, it may
seem unreasonable for honest and deceptive sellers to deviate in
the price they offer, since the gadgets are indistinguishable to
the buyers at the time of purchase. However, as we will discuss
immediately below, there are several reasons why deceptive
sellers might charge less. In the terminology of Wolinsky (1983)
higher price "signals" higher quality. Hence, our second
question is whether sellers in our market employ price signaling.
Why would deceptive sellers charge less? Following Gneezy, liars
that are concerned with the damage their deception causes buyers
might want to compensate by offering a lower price; let us call
this mechanism moral price signaling. An alternative
mechanism is rational price signaling: profit-maximizing
sellers who believe that most buyers prefer to buy lower-priced
goods would actually charge less when deceptive than when honest.
The reason is that the possibility of a higher price is
relatively less attractive for a seller who does not have to bear
the cost of parting with high quality.3
It is difficult to distinguish between these two mechanisms
within the same market framework. Our approach is to let sellers
make offers both to strangers and to friends. The rationale for
this comes from research in sociology and social psychology
showing that information asymmetries lead to strong preferences
for socially embedded transactions on the part of buyers since
friends are more trusted to behave honestly (e.g., Kollock, 1994;
Kollock & O'Brien, 1992; DiMaggio & Louch, 1998; Yamagishi et
al., 1998). Therefore, a seller who gives an offer to a friend
can, regardless of price, be relatively certain that this offer
will not be rejected out of distrust. Consequently,
rational price signaling would not be expected between friends whereas
moral price signaling would, if anything, be more accentuated between friends. Our
third question is thus whether price signaling is dependent on
whether offers are made to social ties or strangers.
The cross-national4 experiment
outlined in the section to follow was designed to answer these
questions. We collected data on sellers as well as buyers. These latter
data allow us to investigate buyers' preferences over
prices and social embeddedness. In particular we want to ascertain that
buyers tend to prefer lower priced offers unless the offer is from a
friend.
2 Method
We conducted experiments concurrently in Sweden and the U.S. The labs at
both locations have a number of isolated subject stations set up for
interactive games over a local network.
2.1 Participants
Potential participants from pools of volunteers were contacted
via telephone (for the U.S. component) or email (for the Swedish
component). The scheduler told the potential participant that the
study required that they bring a "friend or acquaintance"
(hereafter friend) who would also be paid for his or her
participation. Those who were able to bring a friend were
scheduled. 104 participants in the Swedish component and 61
participants in the U.S. component gave a total of 165
participants.5 As described below, 68 participants were
assigned roles as sellers, 97 as buyers.
Table 1: Gadget quality (good vs. bad) and price (in SEK) offered to
friends vs. strangers (s.d. in parentheses)
| Proportion | Mean price | Mean price |
| good quality | good quality | bad quality |
Offers to Friends, declared as good (N = 52)
| 0.71 | 22.16 (4.90)
| 22.33 (4.58) |
Offers to Strangers, declared as good (N = 332)
| 0.64 | 22.89 (4.74) | 19.98 (5.21) |
|
2.2 Procedure
Upon arrival, each participant was escorted to a
private subject room equipped with a networked computer. After filling
out consent and participant information forms, participants completed a
computer-based questionnaire containing a number of questions about
themselves and their friends. Thereafter participants read on-screen
instructions for the experimental procedure. (The software for the
procedure is available on request from the authors.)
Participants in our study bought and sold "gadgets" which came
in different qualities; a good gadget was worth 30 Swedish kronor
to a buyer and 15 Swedish kronor to a seller, whereas a bad
gadget was worth 15 Swedish kronor to a buyer and nothing to a
seller.6 On-screen instructions told each
participant whether he/she was assigned the role as buyer or
seller. After the gadget game (described immediately below) was
completed, participants answered a twenty item questionnaire.
Participants were then paid, debriefed and dismissed.
We begin by discussing the procedures for the seller experiment, and
then turn to the procedures for buyers.
2.3 Procedure for sellers
The instructions for sellers
(Appendix A) explained that they could extend offers to four
different buyers. An offer would consist of a price and a quality
declaration ("good" or "bad"). Sellers would also decide on
the actual quality of the gadget, but buyers would not know the
actual quality until after the purchase and would have no
opportunity for complaint.
Sellers were further informed that each buyer would receive prices
simultaneously from up to four different sellers (listed along with the
sellers' first names and initials and quality
declarations), and could pick at most one of them. Buyers were
identified by first names and last initials, so that sellers could
ostensibly identify friends (and thereby take friendship into account
in making decisions about offers).
Sellers participated in two rounds, with separate sets of buyer-names
for each round. In the first round, one buyer was ostensibly the
seller's friend. Six other ostensible buyers had
typical Swedish or American names.7 Thus, each seller gave in
total six offers to strangers and one offer to a friend.
2.4 Procedure for buyers
Buyers were given a complement to sellers' procedures and
instructions (Appendix B). Specifically, buyers' instructions
explained that they would receive offers from four different
sellers, and could pick at most one of them. Offers consisted of
a price for the gadget, together with a quality declaration
("good" or "bad"). However, buyers were told that sellers
could give false declarations about a gadget's quality. Buyers
saw the first name and initials of sellers, along with prices and
quality declarations. In reality, all offers were simulated.
There were two gadget purchase rounds, each with a separate set of
seller names. In both rounds, all offers had gadgets declared as
good, but at various prices. In each round, buyers decided
which offer, if any, to accept.
In the first purchase, buyers were randomly assigned to one of two
treatments: One treatment showed the friend's name at
the lowest price, the other treatment showed the
friend's name at the third lowest price, with
other offers from strangers with names of the same sex. These two
conditions allow us to address whether socially embedded exchanges are
attractive regardless of competitiveness in price.
In the second purchase, all offers were from strangers to establish the
baseline of buyers' price preferences.
3 Results
3.1 Sellers
We categorize offers in two recipient-categories: 68 offers to
friends and 6 68 = 408 offers to strangers. A minority
of these offers (19.3%) had quality declared as
bad.8 Henceforth, we
only discuss the remaining offers in which the declared quality
was good. For these offers, there are two outcome
variables: (actual) quality and price. Table 1 shows quality and
prices in offers to friends and strangers.9
The table clearly shows that the majority of offers were honest in their
declaration of good quality. It also indicates a correlation between
price and quality in offers to strangers, but not in offers to friends.
In order to test the correlation in offers to strangers, we computed
each seller's average price for good gadgets and
similarly for bad gadgets. Thirty-nine sellers made offers on both good
and bad gadgets. A paired t-test on these data showed a
significant price difference between bad and good gadgets,
t(38) = -4.66, p 0.0001.
We wanted to address more explicitly the interaction between
quality and the buyer-seller relationship in their effects on
price. Note, however, that each seller made only one offer to a
friend. Thus, we had no within-subject variability for quality
and prices to friends. To assess the interaction, we split sellers
in two groups depending on the quality of the gadget delivered to
the friend. For each seller we computed the difference between
the price offered to the friend and the average price delivered
to strangers for a gadget of the same quality as the one
delivered the friend. We wanted to test whether the price
difference in the "bad quality" group (N = 15, mean
2.3, std 7.9) was greater than that in the "good quality" group
(N = 35, mean -1.1, std 4.5). An independent samples
t-test yielded a significant difference between these
groups: t(48) = 1.90, p = .03 (one tailed). In
sum, prices offered to friends did not depend on quality, but
prices to strangers were higher when quality was good.
3.2 Buyers
Table 2 shows buyers' purchases in each of the conditions:
control (i.e., all strangers), friend's name listed with the
lowest price, and friend's name listed with the third lowest
price.
Data from Table 2 clearly support our basic predictions regarding
buyers' behavior. In the control treatment a binomial test
confirms that low offers (1st and 2nd price) have significantly
more takers than higher offers (3rd or 4th price), p < .001.
Still, the very lowest offer was not especially popular,
suggesting that trustworthiness was a concern.10
Finally, we want to show that we observe more takers at a given
price if the seller is a friend. Consider, first, how likely
buyers are to accept the lowest offer. When the friend's offer is
the lowest, 67% of the participants accepted it. However, for
the control condition where the friend does not make an offer),
only 31% of participants accepted the lowest offer. We see the
same preference for socially embedded purchases when the friend's
price is not among the lowest. When the friend offers the third
lowest price, 48% of participants accept it. However, only 21%
participants accept the third lowest price when all offers are
from strangers. More concretely, Fisher's exact test shows that a
friend's name at the lowest price predicts more takers of this
offer than in the control condition, p < .0001; similarly, a
friend's name at the third price predicts more takers of that
offer, p < .005. Thus, buyers tend to solve the problem of social
uncertainty by relying on socially embedded transactions, even if
it means paying a higher price.
Table 2: Buyers' choices in different treatments
| Choice of offer (%): |
| Lowest | 2 | 3 | 4 | No offer |
Control (N=70) | 31 | 31 | 21 | 4 | 11 |
Friend low (N=52) | 67 | 10 | 13 | 8 | 2 |
Friend 3rd (N=44) | 23 | 16 | 48 | 7 | 7 |
|
4 Discussion and conclusion
As expected, we obtained a definite positive answer to our first
question about whether honesty would prevail in a market for lemons:
Even among strangers, only about one third of the products sellers
advertised as peaches were actually lemons.
The second question too received a clear answer: In offers to strangers,
deception about quality is associated with a lower price. The prices
set by deceptive sellers (those who advertised peaches and delivered
lemons) were less than 90% of the prices set by honest sellers (those
who advertised and delivered peaches). In the introduction we outlined
two possible mechanisms that could account for such a pattern: moral
price signaling where, following Gneezy, deceptive sellers try to limit
the damage to buyers caused by the deception; or rational price
signaling, where deceptive sellers are eager to sell their worthless
goods at any price. In the latter case, the rationale to set a lower
price would be to increase the probability of making a sale; as
expected, our data on buyer behavior supports that lower prices are
taken more often than higher prices.
In order to distinguish between these conjectural explanations, we also
studied offers to friends. If people wanted to combine deception with a
low price in order to limit the damage to the other party, then we
would expect the same pattern in offers to friends. We found absolutely
no evidence for price signaling in offers to friends; however, the
limited statistical power on friends in our experimental design was not
sufficient to give a clear answer to whether seller behavior toward
friends was different from their behavior toward strangers. Still, the
observed tendency is in line with what we would expect from rational
price signaling. Our argument in the introduction was based on the
assumption that sellers would expect buyers to buy from friends when
possible (i.e. to prefer socially embedded transactions, in line with
established theory on information asymmetry). Our data on buyers
confirm that they indeed tend to prefer to buy from friends, even when
the price is high.
We would like to remark on the unanticipated result that the majority of
buyers did not choose the lowest-priced offer. Our interpretation is
that most buyers sense the price-signaling that is going on, i.e. they
expect deceptive sellers to try to use low prices to attract suckers.
Marketing research has showed that consumers often infer quality from
price (Zeithamel, 1988), but it is still somewhat surprising that they
do in this type of experimental game.
Summing up, this paper contributes to the literature on uncertainty by
showing how signaling depends critically on important social factors.
In order for price signaling to work, some sellers must be honest.
Otherwise, signals would either never emerge or quickly break down.
However, we have suggested that we need not assume that dishonest
sellers price their lemons lower due to a motivation to limit the
damage caused to the buyer. Rather dishonest sellers capitalize on a
price-signaling system in order to maximize profit by increasing the
likelihood of making a sale. Results from our experimental market are
consistent with these arguments.
References
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market mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics 89, 488-500.
Crawford, V. P. & Sobel, J. (1982). Strategic information
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networks? American Sociological Review, 63, 619-637.
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Appendix A. Instructions and decision form for sellers.
Instructions
In this scenario you own a supply of gadgets, some of which are of bad
quality, i.e. in need of repair, though it doesn't show
on the outside. A good gadget is worth $1.50 to you and $3
to a potential buyer. Because repair costs $1.50, a bad
gadget is worth nothing to you, and $1.50 to a potential buyer. You
can earn money in this game by selling gadgets at a higher price than
their worth to you.
For instance, suppose you make an offer at, say, $2.25 for a good
gadget. If the buyer accepts this offer, your gain will be
$2.25-$1.50 = $0.75 (whereas the buyer will gain
$3.00-$2.25=$0.75). If you make the same offer for a bad gadget, and
it is accepted, your gain will be $2.25, whereas the buyer will gain
$1.50-$2.25=-$0.75 (i.e. the buyer makes a loss).
Buyers will not know if a gadget is good until after they have bought
it, and they will have no opportunity for complaint. You can, if you
wish, lie about the quality by offering a bad gadget and declaring it
to be good.
Every buyer will receive four offers from sellers like you, and will
choose one of them.
First round
In this round you make offers to the below four buyers.
To buyer Mike A. I offer a gadget at price $ , and I declare
it to be .
To buyer John W. I offer a gadget at price $ , and I declare
it to be .
To buyer Shane S. I offer a gadget at price $ , and I declare
it to be .
To buyer David F. I offer a gadget at price $ , and I declare
it to be .
Appendix B. Instructions and decision form for buyers.
Instructions
Gadgets come in two qualities: a good gadget is worth $3 to
you (and $1.50 to the seller) whereas a bad gadget is worth
$1.50 to you (and nothing to the seller).
You will receive offers from four different sellers. An offer consists
of a price for the gadget and a quality declaration of whether the
gadget on sale is good or bad. However, a seller may give a false
declaration, misrepresenting a bad gadget as good.
You may assume that you have an account with money to use for purchase
of gadgets; what you earn in this scenario is the difference between
the price worth of the gadget you buy and the price you pay for it. For
instance, if you accept an offer at, say, $2.25, and it turns out to
be a good gadget, your gain will be $(3.00-2.25)=$.75. On the other
hand, if it turns out to be a bad gadget, you will gain
$(1.50-2.25)=-$0.75, i.e. a loss, which will be subtracted from your
total gains of this experiment.
First round
Four sellers have given you the following offers. Accept one or none of
them.
Kelly R. offers you a gadget for $2.10, declaring it
as good. Accept this offer:
Anna A. offers you a gadget for $1.80 , declaring it
as good. Accept this offer:
Darla H. offers you a gadget for $2.50, declaring it
as good. Accept this offer:
Lisa R. offers you a gadget for $2.30 , declaring it
as good. Accept this offer:
Accept none of these offers:
Footnotes:
1This research was supported by
grants from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the
Swedish Research Council, and the Uniitd States National
Science Foundation. We are grateful to Elin Hansen and Tucker
McGrimmon for carrying out the experiments. Corresponding
author: Kimmo Eriksson, Mälardalen University, Dept of
Mathematics and Physics, Box 883, SE-721 23 Västerås,
Sweden, kimmo.eriksson@mdh.se.
2In a recent preprint,
Demichelis and Weibull (2006) derive interesting game-theoretic
implications of a very slight preference for honesty.
3Formally, if
P(x) denotes the seller's expected probability of selling if
offering at price x, then we assume that P(x) is a
decreasing, continuously differentiable function of x. If w
denotes the value of the gadget to the seller, then the
expected profit from an offer at price x is vw(x) = (x-w) ·P(x). The optimal offer is the price xw for which the
derivative of the profit equals zero: (xw - w) P '(xw) + P(xw) = 0 Þ w = xw + P(xw) / P '(xw). The probability function P(x) is always
non-negative, and we have assumed its derivative to be
negative, so the right-hand side is non-positive when xw
equals zero. By continuity, the right-hand expression must
reach the value of a low quality gadget before it reaches the
greater value of a high quality gadget, i.e., xlow < xhigh.
4Data were collected in Sweden and the U.S.
as part of a larger research project on trust and trustworthiness.
Comparative aspects are not studied in the present paper.
5A computer failure resulted in the loss of
one data point at the U.S. site, hence the odd number of U.S.
participants.
6For the U.S. component, the conversion rate 10
SEK = 1 USD was used.
7As part of another study
the eighth buyer had a typical Muslim name; we exclude these offers
from our analyses in the present paper.
8As one would expect, prices of gadgets
declared as bad were all in the range of up to 15 Swedish
kronor, the value of a bad gadget to a buyer.
9Genders
differed significantly in one aspect only: in offers to
friends, female sellers showed a much higher degree of honesty
(92%) than the male sellers (50%).
10In
interviews at the conclusion of the experiment, participants
often reported that they followed a heuristic to avoid the
lowest price because it was "too good to be true."
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