The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Why Do People Keep Their Promises? An Experimental Test of Two Explanations
Open accessAbstract
Numerous psychological and economic experiments have shown that the exchange of promises greatly enhances cooperative behavior in experimental games. This paper seeks to test two theories to explain this effect. The first posits that individuals have a preference for keeping their word. The second assumes that people dislike letting down others' payoff expectations. According to the latter account, promises affect behavior only indirectly, because they lead to changes in the payoff expectations attributed to others. I conduct an experiment designed to distinguish between and test these alternative explanations. The results demonstrate that the effects of promises cannot be accounted for by changes in payoff expectations. This suggests that people have a preference for promise keeping per se.
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Citations
Cited by
LIES IN DISGUISE-AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON CHEATING
Fischbacher, U., & Föllmi-Heusi, F. (2013) · Journal of the European Economic Association · doi:10.1111/jeea.12014 · Cited by 1,243
Erat, S., & Gneezy, U. (2012) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.1110.1449 · Cited by 698
Damgaard, M. T., & Nielsen, H. S. (2018) · Economics of Education Review · doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2018.03.008 · Cited by 321
Cohn, A., Gesche, T., & Maréchal, M. A. (2022) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.2021.3985 · Cited by 62
Fischer, S., & Grosch, K. (2025) · Games and Economic Behavior · doi:10.1016/j.geb.2025.05.012 · Cited by 1
Metadata
- Venue
- Econometrica
- Publisher
- The Econometric Society
- Published
- 2008
- Volume
- 76
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1467-1480
- ISSN
- 0012-9682 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W6959323231
- Cited by
- 467
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 51.18
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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