Lies, Narratives and Persuasion

13:40-14:30, Monday, June 2, 2025

I-206, Boxue Building

Prof. Marie Claire Villeval is a Research Professor in economics at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the head of GATE-Lab at the University of Lyon, France. She is Past President of the Economic Science Association (ESA), the founding President of the French association of experimental economics (ASFEE), and a former President of the French Economic Association (AFSE). She is a Fellow of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) and a member of the Academia Europaea, IZA and GLO. She has been awarded the Silver Medal of CNRS in 2017 and the Allais Memorial Prize in Behavioral Sciences. She is Department Editor at Management Science, Advisory Editor at Experimental Economics, and Honorary Editor at the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Her main research interests are behavioral and experimental economics applied to the analysis of the efficiency of incentives, the dynamics of social norms, ethics and dishonesty, biases in the transmission of information, and narratives. She has published more than 125 papers, in various journals including the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Management Science, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, and PNAS. 

Understanding the strategic adaptation of dishonesty in economic interactions is crucial for designing effective market institutions. This talk synthesizes findings from three experimental studies examining deception, persuasion, and self-serving narratives in asymmetric information settings. The first study explores how individuals adjust their lying strategies in repeated interactions with reputation concerns, showing that reputation and competition do not eliminate fraud but merely shift it towards more deniable forms of deception. The second study investigates the effectiveness of honesty oaths in financial markets, highlighting that while oaths increase moral costs of lying, they are neither necessary nor sufficient to sustain trust, as investors ultimately rely on personal experience. The third study examines the strategic use of narratives about luck in competitive settings, demonstrating how individuals selectively frame past outcomes to influence decision-makers while remaining internally unconvinced by their own justifications. Together, these studies provide insights into the limits of institutional mechanisms in curbing dishonesty in economic environments.

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