TY - JOUR
T1 - Studying deception without deceiving participants
T2 - an experiment of deception experiments
AU - Alberti, Federica
AU - Güth, Werner
N1 - NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 93, (2013), DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2013.04.001, http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0167268113000954
PY - 2013/9/1
Y1 - 2013/9/1
N2 - Like avoiding labor protection laws via foreign subcontractors, banning deception in economic experiments does not exclude experiments with participants in the role of experimenters who, similar to properly incentivized subcontractors, can gain by deceiving those in the role of proper participants. We compare treatments with and without possible deception by ‘experimenter-participants’ in a dictator experiment and test whether participants in the role of experimenters engage in deception and whether deception affects the behavior of ‘participant-participants.’ We find that most participants in the role of experimenters engage in deception and that there is no difference in the behavior of participant-participants between treatments, even when repeating the experiment without deception after debriefing. Our results can be viewed as a contribution to studying the effects of unethical behavior via outsourcing it to subcontractors, by letting them do the harm.
AB - Like avoiding labor protection laws via foreign subcontractors, banning deception in economic experiments does not exclude experiments with participants in the role of experimenters who, similar to properly incentivized subcontractors, can gain by deceiving those in the role of proper participants. We compare treatments with and without possible deception by ‘experimenter-participants’ in a dictator experiment and test whether participants in the role of experimenters engage in deception and whether deception affects the behavior of ‘participant-participants.’ We find that most participants in the role of experimenters engage in deception and that there is no difference in the behavior of participant-participants between treatments, even when repeating the experiment without deception after debriefing. Our results can be viewed as a contribution to studying the effects of unethical behavior via outsourcing it to subcontractors, by letting them do the harm.
KW - Experimental economic methods
KW - Deception
KW - Experiments
U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2013.04.001
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2013.04.001
M3 - Article
SN - 0167-2681
VL - 93
SP - 196
EP - 204
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
ER -