Lying and team incentives

► We investigate the effect of individual piece-rates and team incentives on lying. ► We adapt the experimental setup of Fischbacher and Heusi (2008). ► Lying is more pronounced under team incentives than under individual piece rates. ► Subjects tend to lie more under team incentives because they can diffuse their responsibility. ► Subjects who are younger, male, high on Extraversion and Neuroticism lie more. We investigate the influence of two popular compensation schemes on subjects’ inclination to lie by adapting an experimental setup of Fischbacher and Heusi (2008). Lying turns out to be more pronounced under team incentives than under individual piece-rates, which highlights a fairly neglected feature of compensation schemes. Moreover, when disentangling different motives of the more pronounced unethical conduct under team incentives, we find that subjects tend to lie more under team incentives because they can diffuse their responsibility, i.e., their deceptive acts cannot unambiguously be attributed to them individually. Our findings are robust even when controlling for individual difference variables. In both compensation schemes subjects who are younger, male, high on Extraversion, and high on Neuroticism tend to lie more.