Jim Devine wrote:
what I was thinking about was that there may be ways of organizing these experiments to avoid the pollution of the Allocator's motives by the need to please the Experimenter. Has anyone put such an experimental design into practice?
I haven't seen anything specific, although the papers by Levitt and List were published only this year. I have seen one study from Europe that looks at the motives of the allocator in a dictator game. The authors ask the players why they make specific choices. The findings claim that almost all the participants who allocated their endowment to the recipients (75% of the study) provide a moral reason for their behavior. I suppose Levitt and List might claim that the players' responses are less than truthful. http://zs.thulb.uni-jena.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/jportal_derivate_00038793/wp_2007_047.pdf Some to the behaviorists (Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein for example) are into neuroeconomics. They can attach electrodes to the subjects and acquire data about behavior. I don't know much about this area, but they claim to be able to measure, among other things, deception in bargaining.
