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...

We use a limited information environment to assess the role of confusion in the repeated voluntary contributions game. A comparison with play in a standard version of the game suggests, that the common claim that decision errors due to confused subjects biases estimates of cooperation upwards,...

This paper studies the vulnerability of the pivotal mechanism with respect to manipulation by groups. In a lab experiment, groups decide on the implementation of various alternatives, some of which imply opposite interests for the two subgroups. We investigate the occurrence of tacit and...