Since homo sapiens is a social animal, one might expect human nature - the set of psychological propensities with which our species is naturally endowed - to equip human beings to live in social groups. In this chapter, we consider the implications of this idea for economics and game theory. We...

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...

A neglected critique of social science laboratories alleges that they implement phenomena different to those supposedly under investigation. The critique purports to be conceptual and so invulnerable to a technical solution. I argue that it undermines some economics designs seeking to implement...

In public goods experiments, stochastic choice, censoring and motivational heterogeneity give scope for disagreement over the extent of unselfishness, and whether it is reciprocal or altruistic. We show that these problems can be addressed econometrically, by estimating a finite mixture model to...

Preference reversals are frequently observed in the lab, but almost all designs use completely transparent prospects, which are rarely features of decision making elsewhere. This raises questions of external validity. We test the robustness of the phenomenon to gambles that incorporate realistic...