%0 Unpublished work %T The value of lies in a power-to-take game with imperfect information %+ Centre d'Economie de l'Université Paris Nord (CEPN) %+ ESSEC Business School %A Besancenot, Damien %A Dubart, Delphine %A Vranceanu, Radu %Z ESSEC Working paper. Document de Recherche ESSEC / Centre de recherche de l'ESSEC ISSN : 1291-9616 WP1205 %8 2012-03-16 %D 2012 %K Ultimatum game %K Taxation %K Lies %K Deception %K Asymmetric information %Z Humanities and Social Sciences/Economics and FinancePreprints, Working Papers, ... %X Humans can lie strategically in order to leverage on their negotiation power. For instance, governments can claim that a "scapegoat" third party is responsible for reforms that impose higher costs on citizens, in order to make the pill sweeter. This paper analyzes such communication strategy within a variant of the ultimatum game. The first player gets an endowment, and the second player can impose a tax on it. The former can reject the allocation submitted by the tax-setter. A third party is then allowed to levy its own tax, and its intake is private information to the tax-setter. In a frameless experiment, 65% of the subjects in the tax-setter role overstate the tax levied by the third party in order to manipulate taxpayer's expectations and submit less advantageous offers; on average, for every additional currency unit of lie, measured by the gap between the claimed and the actual tax, they would reduce their offer by 0.43 currency units. %G English %2 https://essec.hal.science/hal-00690409/document %2 https://essec.hal.science/hal-00690409/file/WP1205.pdf %L hal-00690409 %U https://essec.hal.science/hal-00690409 %~ SHS %~ UNIV-PARIS13 %~ ESSEC %~ CNRS %~ AO-ECONOMIE %~ ESSEC-WP %~ CEPN %~ CONDORCET3 %~ CAMPUS-CONDORCET %~ SORBONNE-PARIS-NORD