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Cited by 698

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

White Lies

Open access
Erat, Sanjiv, Gneezy, Uri·2012·Management Science

Abstract

In this paper we distinguish between two types of white lies: those that help others at the expense of the person telling the lie, which we term altruistic white lies, and those that help both others and the liar, which we term Pareto white lies. We find that a large fraction of participants are reluctant to tell even a Pareto white lie, demonstrating a pure lie aversion independent of any social preferences for outcomes. In contrast, a nonnegligible fraction of participants are willing to tell an altruistic white lie that hurts them a bit but significantly helps others. Comparing white lies to those where lying increases the liar's payoff at the expense of another reveals important insights into the interaction of incentives, lying aversion, and preferences for payoff distributions. Finally, in line with previous findings, women are less likely to lie when it is costly to the other side. Interestingly though, we find that women are more likely to tell an altruistic lie. This paper was accepted by Teck Ho, decision analysis.

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Metadata

Authors
Erat, S., & Gneezy, U.
Venue
Management Science
Published
2012-04
Volume
58
Issue
4
Pages
723-733
ISSN
  • 0025-1909 (ISSN-L)
  • 1526-5501
OpenAlex
W2913265986
Cited by
698
References
36
FWCI
89.20
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: White Lies. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1449
The paper
Erat, S., & Gneezy, U. (2012). White Lies. Management Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1449

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.