Secure Survey Design in Organizations: Theory and Experiments

Abstract

We study secure survey designs in organizational settings where fear of retaliation makes it hard to elicit 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.