ECONOMICS IN THE LABORATORY

The questions addressed in this paper include: What is a laboratory experiment? What are the reasons why economists conduct such experiments? What have we learned? Among the many findings of experiments are included: institutions (the rules of exchange) matter; optimization in markets is not achieved by conscious calculation; less information is sometimes better; common information is not sufficient to yield common 'knowledge' or expectations; underrevelation is compatible with efficiency; and fairness is a matter of tastes or expectations. Also discussed is the methodological role of experiments in contributing to our knowledge of how things work.