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Control without Deception

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Author Info
Nicholas Bardsley () (University of Amsterdam)
Abstract

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect of making "others' behaviour" a controlled variable, but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute the pool of subjects. This paper proposes and implements a new experimental design, the Conditional Information Lottery, which offers all the benefits of deception without actually deceiving anyone. The design should be suitable for most economics experiments, and works by a modification of an already standard device, the Random Lottery incentive system. The deceptive scenarios of designs which use deceit are replaced with fictitious scenarios, each of which, from a subject's viewpoint, has a chance of being true. The design is implemented in a public good experiment prompted by Weimann's (1994) result, from a deceptive design, that subjects are more sensitive to free-riding than cooperation on the part of others. The experiment provides similar results to Weimann's, in that subjects are at least as cooperative when uninformed about others' behaviour as they are if reacting to high contributions. No deception is used and the data cohere well both internally and with other public goods experiments. In addition, simultaneous play is found to be more efficient than sequential play, and subjects contribute less at the end of a sequence than at the start. The results suggest pronounced elements of overconfidence, egoism and (biased) reciprocity in behaviour, which may explain decay in contributions in repeated play designs. The experiment shows there is a workable alternative to deception.

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Paper provided by Tinbergen Institute in its series Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers with number 00-107/1.

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Date of creation: 18 Dec 2000
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Handle: RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20000107

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Related research
Keywords: experimental economics; deception; reciprocity; public goods;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments
C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References listed on IDEAS
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