Research in Experimental Economics – serie

This special volume is devoted to a single topic. In the past several years, many governments, including the United States and Canada, launched a major shift to what are sometimes called "incentive based" pollution control procedures. Because these proposed systems inherently required institutional design, they constituted a natural domain for laboratory experimental economics research.

Volume 8 of "Research in Experimental Economics" provides a forum for papers incorporating laboratory experimental economics. These specifically include interdisciplinary papers, papers that report experimental design innovations and papers that report detailed data. The paper by Isaac, Walker and Williams is an example. It discusses the design of instructional experiments in such areas as monopoly, asset trading double auctions, and public goods. The paper also examines practical issues of using laboratory experiments as a teaching tool. Four papers report on public goods research. Krishnamurthy, motivated by research questions in Marketing, examines the role of non-binding, face-to-face communication in public goods environments with and without provision points. Chewning, Coller, and Laury incorporate a natural modification of previous provision-point environments, namely, multiple provision points in which additional amounts of the public good will be provided at increasing threshold steps. The paper by Packard, Isaac, and Bial extends research on the marginal per capita return effect (broken down between the MPCR affecting own payoff and affecting others). This paper takes that distinction to a boundary in which the public good provides no marginal per capita return to the contributor. The paper by Croson examines, in the light of the literature on team production, the effect in a public goods environment of different levels of feedback on others' contributions. In one treatment, individuals know only the aggregate contributions of others, while in the other treatment they had information on individual decisions. The paper by Kelly extends existing research regarding single sellers by providing for multiproduct monopolists. It is not merely the addition of additional products that distinguishes this paper, but also the fact that monopolists have a bundling decision to make. This volume concludes with two papers that use controlled experiments for testing policy-relevant allocation mechanisms. Elliott, Kruse, Schulze, and Ben-David examine four mechanisms for the rationing of productive inputs that are subject to supply shocks. Electricity markets are one obvious motivation, but certainly not the only one. Ishikida, Ledyard, Olson, and Porter present experimental "testbedding" research on the California RECLAIM emissions permit market.

Experimental economists are leaving the reservation. They are recruiting subjects in the field rather than in the classroom, using field goods rather than induced valuations, and using field context rather than abstract terminology in instructions. This volume examines the methodology of field experiments, and offers a wide array of applications of field experiments. The methodological issues revolve around the ability of field experimenters to ensure the same degree of control that lab experimenters claim. The applications cover issues such as risk and time preferences of the Danish population, savings decisions of the Canadian working poor, differences between the social preferences of American students and workers, the effect of educational vouchers on American school children, and differences in bargaining behavior across nations. This volume serves as an introduction to the issues and applications of this new area of experimental economics.

This volume consists of nine papers that use experimental and theoretical tools to examine issues pertaining to charitable auctions and fundraising. In recent years, the revenue-generating effects of different fundraising techniques have been a subject of increasing policy interest as private, religious and state originations have come to rely increasingly on fundraising activities for revenues. Experimental methods provide an ideal context for conducting the dialogue between economists, fundraisers and policymakers regarding the revenue and social consequences of alternative fundraising methods. Themes explored in the volume include the structure of charity auctions, charity lotteries, fund drives as well as some of broader issues underlying charitable behaviour. It explores the structure of different fundraising and charitable programs. It is a valuable resource for economists, fundraisers and policymakers interested in the consequences of their fundraising efforts.

This series presents research utilizing laboratory experimental methods in economics. A distinction between this book series and traditional journals is that the book series format allows for papers and features that might not be appropriate for journals. Some examples which have been included in this series are: papers with complete presentation of experimental instructions and data, papers which report replication and robustness results, methodological papers, and theoretical papers motivated specifically by experimentation. The series currently consists of two different types of volumes. Some volumes are open-submission covering all topics. The papers in these volumes are reviewed externally. The other volumes, recently undertaken and with Prof. Charles Holt as a co-editor, are focused on a single, broad research topic with papers solicited and reviewed by the co-editors.

This volume will present experimental economics research focusing on issues of environmental quality and sustainability. Specific topics will include institutions for cap-and-trade, eco-tourism, urban sprawl, and optimal pollution control strategies. In addition to the traditional 'introduction', we are asking an expert on engineering issues in energy, the environment, and sustainability to write an essay highlighting the benefits to scientists and engineers of understanding human behaviour.

This volume provides a comprehensive review of the empirical evidence on corruption generated by recent laboratory and field experiments conducted by economists and political scientists. The first part of the volume reviews the evidence produced by laboratory experiments in relation to gender and cultural differences in corruption decision-making, as well as the effectiveness of different anti-corruption policies. This part concludes with an assessment of the external validity of corruption investigations relying on laboratory experiments. The second part of the volume reviews recent contributions to corruption research made through the use of field experiments. Special attention is given to advances in measuring corruption in the field, investigations of clientelism and vote-buying, and the role that information can play in the fight against corruption. A critical assessment of the effectiveness of top-down and bottom-up anti-corruption interventions completes this section. The volume concludes with important reflections on the role that behavioral and experimental economics can play in anti-corruption research and practice.

Research in Experimental Economics focuses on laboratory experimental economics, but welcomes work from authors of theoretical, empirical, or field economic research if it would be of interest to the broader experimental economics community. The goal of Research in Experimental Economics is to be complementary with, and not in competition with, traditional journals as outlets for experimental work. Research in Experimental Economics has the freedom to consider papers that may not be appropriate for traditional journals for a variety of reasons. Some examples of these strengths include: theme volumes, replication studies, research which requires longer manuscripts for presentation of data or analysis, and papers on methodological topics. The volumes of Research in Experimental Economics are not tied to specific, recurring conferences. Typically, a volume theme is established with scholars who are willing to serve as volume-specific editors. The only constraint the senior editor places on the volume editors is that the papers should undergo a formal referee process using the same quality standards as traditional journals. Recent topics have included market power, charitable contributions, and field experiments.

Macroeconomic models and assumptions have traditionally been evaluated using non-experimental "field" data. However, in many instances the field data necessary to evaluate such models and assumptions are not available. Recently, researchers have begun to explore ways of implementing micro-founded macroeconomic models in the controlled conditions of the experimental laboratory as an alternative means of gathering the data necessary to address the empirical relevance of macroeconomic models and assumptions as well as to understand questions of equilibrium selection or policy prescriptions. This volume is the first-ever collection of laboratory studies aimed at understanding macroeconomic phenomena. The chapters, by leading researchers in the field, explore consumption behavior, expectation formation, monetary economics and central bank policy in a variety of different macroeconomic models. Readers will come away with a better understanding of how to implement macroeconomic models in the laboratory and the valuable insights that laboratory research can bring to our understanding of macroeconomics.

Replication in Experimental Economics' highlights the importance of replicating previous economic experiments for understanding the robustness and generalizability of behavior. Replication enables experimental findings to be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Despite this obvious advantage, direct replication remains relatively scant in economics. One possible explanation for this situation is that publication outlets favor novel work over tests of robustness. This volume of Research in Experimental Economics raises awareness of the need for replication by being the first collection of papers specifically dedicated to the replication of previously published work. The chapters, by leading researchers in the field, explore the robustness of topics from the effects of subsidizing charitable giving to people's ability to backwards induct and from the impact of social history on trust to the role of isolation on valuation. Readers will gain a better understanding of the role that replication plays in scientific discovery as well as valuable insights into the robustness of previously reported findings.

'Experiments in Organizational Economics' highlights the importance of replicating previous economic experiments. Replication enables experimental findings to be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Despite this obvious advantage, direct replication remains relatively scant in economics. One possible explanation for this situation is that publication outlets favor novel work over tests of robustness.  Readers will gain a better understanding of the role that replication plays in economic discovery as well as valuable insights into the robustness of previously reported findings.

Culture has been referred to as a shared frame, the lens through which group members make sense of the world. It has been robustly linked to economic outcomes on the macro level and is also directly linked to decision-making: in recent years, experimental and behavioral economists have found evidence that culture impacts behavior in games and impacts value orientation, trust, fairness, cooperation and enforcement. Culture research in experimental economics is still in its early stages and part of the challenge is methodological and conceptual: how to measure culture and how to define the level at which individuals share a culture. In the coming years, this research will help delineate where the results from our current experiments apply. For example, do current results speak specifically to WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies) societies? Do they say something more fundamental about human nature across time, experience, and geography? With increasing migration and globalization, subject pools may become more culturally diverse and cultural questions therefore increasingly important for experimentalists. The contributions in this volume are both conceptual and experimental. The earlier chapters discuss new approaches to the measurement of culture and how to conceptualize and define values and beliefs and the groups that share them. The latter experimental chapters contribute to the growing body of literature that documents cultural differences in social and economic behavior.

Behavioural economists have developed alternatives to Expected Utility Theory as descriptive and normative models of risk preferences. One popular view is that these alternative descriptive models are generally better descriptively, but that they tend to be inferior normative models for guiding risky decisions. Models of Risk Preferences collects studies that critically review these two claims from the perspective of experimental economics.The Research in Experimental Economics series focuses on laboratory experimental economics, but includes theoretical, empirical, or field economic research to encompass the broader experimental economics community.

Experiments. Law. Economics. Those three words taken by themselves encompass vast parts of the human intellectual experience. Even when we link them together as Experimental Law and Economics, we see a large and diverse body of inquiry over the last half century. This 21st volume of Research in Experimental Economics focuses on experimental and empirical investigations into topics about both the economic effects of the law and how economic theories can explain the behavior of individuals within a legal system.The papers in this volume follow two long-standing traditions. Firstly, the tradition of experimental methodology that allows one to test the potential impacts of alternate institutional arrangements. Secondly, a subset of the papers in this volume, in addition to exploring institutional change, follow the tradition in experimental economics of replication and robustness studies.Illuminating three key areas, by summarizing mechanisms to facilitate the assembly of property rights, exploring legal procedure, and replicating classic market experiments using more recent experimental methods to understand how different market rules affect market outcomes, each of these papers contributes to one of the broader areas within experimental law and economics.