Data and Code for: Secure Survey Design in Organizations: Theory and Experiments (Chassang & Zehnder, AEJMicro)

We study secure survey designs in organizational settings where fear of retaliation makes it hard to elicit the truth. Theory predicts that: (i) randomized-response techniques offer no improvement, because they are strategically equivalent to direct elicitation, (ii) exogenously distorting survey responses (hard-garbling) can improve information transmission, and (iii) the impact of survey design on reporting can be estimated in equilibrium. Laboratory experiments confirm that hard garbling outperforms direct elicitation, but randomized response works better than expected. False accusations slightly, but persistently bias treatment effect estimates. Additional experiments reveal that play converges to equilibrium if learning from others' experience is possible.

Data and code accompanying the article:

All data used in the article were generated in the course of conducting laboratory
experiments at the University of Lausanne. All subjects were undergraduate students recruited from the University of Lausanne (UNIL), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) or the Swiss Hotel Management School (EHL) using the ORSEE system (Greiner, 2015). Each subject participated in one session only. All interactions of participants were completely anonymous. The experiment was programmed and conducted with z-Tree (Fischbacher, 2007).

The data was collected in two waves. Our main analysis is conducted on a first wave of data -- referred to as the original treatments -- collected from March to May 2015.  We conducted 6 sessions for each treatment. A second wave of data collection -- referred to as the social learning treatments -- was collected between October and November 2015. We conducted again 6 sessions per treatment. Overall we conducted 36 sessions with a total of 720 participants. Each session lasted approximately 90 minutes and subjects earned on average about 37 Swiss Francs (including a show-up fee of 10 Swiss Francs).

This deposit provides the data and code to reproduce all results (Figures, Tables and numbers reported in text) of our article. In addition, we also provide the instructions for participants and the code to run the experiment.

The following publications are supplemented by the data in this project.

Chassang, Sylvain, and Christian Zehnder. “Secure Survey Design in Organizations: Theory and Experiments.” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 16, no. 4 (November 2024): 371–405. https://doi.org/10.1257/mic.20220187.