5. Conclusion
The literature on dishonesty has bloomed in recent years. Following psychologists but starting from a different
perspective of standard models of rational cheating, economists have produced substantial experimental evidence
on (dis-)honesty. The literature in economics and psychology has confirmed that even when there is (almost) no
risk of detection, lying is incomplete and not universal, revealing the heterogeneity of moral costs and rejecting
the simplistic standard economics-of-crime model.
The more specific dimensions of recent economic research are twofold. First, if moral costs interact with the
extrinsic benefit of cheating, in strategic interactions this relationship is affected by the existence of pro-social and
anti-social preferences, concerns for status and norms, and asymmetric information. Second, the economic analysis
of unethical behavior emphasizes the importance of institutions and incentives on the individuals’ propensity to cheat, with certain rules or organizational modes more likely than others to bend moral firmness. These findings open new challenges. One is producing alternative theoretical models of (un-)ethical behavior [71]. Another one is deriving policy implications to design more efficient rules and incentives to combat unethical behavior. This includes reflections on how to nudge
people so that they prefer keeping a good image of
themselves rather than trading off a small monetary
benefit for a bigger loss of self-concept. Another major
challenge is building a behavioral ethics approach able to
bridge and fertilize knowledge from psychology, econom-
ics, neuroeconomics (see [72] on pupil dilation, [73] on
hormones or [29] on emotions on cheating), and