A Note on Deception in Economic Experiments

1 E-mails with a number of researchers, especially Charlie Plott, suggest that the norm of not using deception did not leap into existence wholly formed at some specific point in time but, instead, grew organically from Plott's early papers on public choice and preference reversals and Smith's early papers on markets. This gradual development was driven by concerns about a potential loss of control, as discussed in this note, but also reflected a need to differentiate economic experiments from those conducted by psychologists that lacked procedures and controls required for application of economic theories. Given that the target audience at the time consisted largely of economic theorists, there was need to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that economists were conducting clean tests of the relevant theory.