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This paper addresses the experimental trade-off between the exercise of control over the actions of the experimental participants and the potential to provide understanding about human behavior. Control is a requirement of the experimental method to produce pertinent and intelligible results for scientific inquiry. But the more control is exercised the more the experimental results are the outcome of economists' actions. Economic experiments must therefore achieve a difficult balance. They must elicit intelligible behavior while ensuring that the actions of those taking part in the experiment are not determined by the design set-up and the rules of the experiment. The paper puts forward criteria for the analysis of the level of participation of experimental subjects in economics experiments and applies them to several experiments to illustrate the relevance of assessing the agency of experimental participants when deriving inferences about human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the rationality of anger in the light of a standard notion of economic rationality. Whether anger is rational or otherwise cannot be answered in general, but will depend on the economic setting. As long as anger can be explained as a preference in a parsimonious and stable utility function, it does not make sense to talk of anger as rational or irrational. The production of anger is subtly mediated by many cognitive factors. These (and the anger-induced cognitive effects and intertemporal inconsistency of preferences) underlie what are the genuine problems that anger creates for rational choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]