Flowers and an honour box: Evidence on framing effects

• We analyse different aspects of honesty of a sample of customers who purchase flowers via the honour market under very controlled conditions in their natural environment.
• The set-up allows us to leave different messages (moral suasion, legal threats, family business framing and consulting business framing) next to the cashbox to influence honest behaviour.
• Our main finding is that only the family business framing significantly increases payment rate and turnover.
• The treatment difference suggests that lying depends on the potential harm it inflicts on others as customers are less likely to steal from a person than a larger company.
• The finding is further substantiated with the result, that people who come in a group of family or friends have a significantly higher turnover and payment rate as well.

This paper analyses the behaviour of customers in a flower field, where payment is made into an honour box. There is a price indicated for the flowers. However, as no monitoring takes place and the farmer has never enforced formal law, people can decide how much they want to pay. If people were to make a narrow rational choice, they would simply take the unsupervised flowers without paying and the market would collapse. However, payments were and are in general high enough to make considerable profits. The business is flourishing. In the experiment, we left several different messages next to the cashbox to influence payments. Legal threats and moral appeals were studied in similar field settings with mixed results. We hypothesize that legal threats and moral appeals are less important than the context in which people make their decision. Once we indicated that the flower field belonged to a family, turnover and payment rate per customer increased substantially. We also observed a switch to fewer but more expensive flowers. However, no significant results were obtained for other treatments: consulting framing, moral appeal and legal threats. The results show that to understand the market success of a business, we have to investigate the expectations and opinions which people associate with the specific business context.