How individuals report private information is a matter of substantial economic importance that has gathered considerable theoretical and empirical attention. Contrary to standard economic theory, experimental studies have found that individuals are lying averse and that this aversion is driven by two types of psychological costs: an intrinsic aversion to report false information and an aversion to being perceived as a liar. However, we still know little about the forces that shape such costs and their pervasiveness in the general population. In this paper, we tackle these questions by implementing a lying experiment in the context of the 2020 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). Across two within-subject treatments we vary the extent to which participants can be perceived as a liar. We exploit the rich data of the SOEP-IS panel and the within-subject nature of our experiment to study how the two key lying costs identified in previous work correlate with a large array of social, demographic and psychological characteristics of participants.
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