title: Experimental economics' inconsistent ban on deception.
abstract: According to what I call the 'argument from public bads', if a researcher deceived subjects in the past, there is a chance that subjects will discount the information that a subsequent researcher provides, thus compromising the validity of the subsequent researcher's experiment. While this argument is taken to justify an existing informal ban on explicit deception in experimental economics, it can also apply to implicit deception, yet implicit deception is not banned and is sometimes used in experimental economics. Thus, experimental economists are being inconsistent when they appeal to the argument from public bads to justify banning explicit deception but not implicit deception.
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, Department of Philosophy, 9500 Gilman Drive # 0119, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119, USA. Electronic address: hersch@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Gil
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hersch
mesh_terms: D008192:Deception; D004467:Economics; D006801:Humans; D012107:Research Design; D035842:Research Subjects / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: Deception; Experimental economics; Public bad