Ignorance of facts and laws may provide an excuse for self-serving reporting behavior, even at the risk of telling the untruth. This paper examines what decision-makers report when they do not know their true entitlement to a financial gain, why they do so, and how the resulting dilemma under ignorance can be mitigated. In a theory-guided online experiment, I show that ignorance substantially increases self-serving but potentially untruthful reporting behavior relative to a full-information benchmark. Three mechanisms – two behavioral and one institutional – drive this shift: (i) decision-makers' beliefs about their true entitlement, (ii) social norms governing reporting under ignorance, and (iii) the requirement to provide a definite statement. I evaluate two interventions: allowing information acquisition and offering a fair buyout of the unknown entitlement. Both mitigate self-serving reporting under ignorance, but the fair buyout involves a trade-off: it has the unintended side effect of increasing dishonesty among informed decision-makers.
This work identifies a failure mode not addressed by a stronger model: when the context contains an assertion by a party with an incentive toward optimism - here the sales representative, a witness recorded in the CRM - the model treats the assertion as evidence and clears deals the company's own records deem unaccepta...
Powerholders can be the object of great respect and admiration, but they may also be distrusted and "canceled" in the court of public opinion. This raises the question of whether power is an asset or a detriment when one is implicated in wrongdoing. Different theoretical perspectives informed competing hypotheses, sugg...
G. V. van Kleef, Seval Gündemir, Rohan L. Dunham et al.· Journal of Personality and S...· 0 citations
The framework strategic interactive oversight (SIO), which treats oversight jointly as a verification mechanism and a strategic communication channel, is introduced and the notion of task-admissible latent optimisation is formalised, which entails the pursuit of latent objectives while maintaining a prescribed task per...
Rayne Holland, Li-Ming Zhu, Jason Xue· 0 citations
Suppose that expert witnesses appearing in litigation are, generically, either honest in their assessment of a fact situation or are advocates who testify in favour of their retaining party, regardless of new information. The type of a witness is known to law firms, who engage with them repeatedly, but not to courts....
Martin Richardson, J. Rodrigues-Neto· Canadian Journal of Economic...· 0 citations
An LLM agent shown a professional-looking market panel commits to a directional call on a provably unpredictable question far more often than one asked the bare question: across 12 frontier models, commitment rises from 6.5% to 54.0% as evidence is escalated. It commits just as readily when every number on the panel is...
Pranav Aggarwal· 0 citations
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