The Dozen Things Experimental Economists Should Do (More of)

Abstract

What was once broadly viewed as an impossibility—learning from experimental data in economics—has now become commonplace. Governmental bodies, think tanks, and corporations around the world employ teams of experimental researchers to answer their most pressing questions. For their part, in the past two decades academics have begun to more actively partner with organizations to generate data via field experimentation. Although this revolution in evidence‐based approaches has served to deepen the economic science, recently a credibility crisis has caused even the most ardent experimental proponents to pause. This study takes a step back from the burgeoning experimental literature and introduces 12 actions that might help to alleviate this credibility crisis and raise experimental economics to an even higher level. In this way, we view our “12 action wish list” as discussion points to enrich the field.

Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research

“…Many programs that accommodate these approaches, including R, Python, and Julia, are open source, making it easier for members of the research community to look under the hood and possibly reduce the risk of the software computational errors documented in McCullough and Vinod (2003). 45 Computational aspects of reproducibility are discussed at length in Stodden, Leisch, and Peng (2014).…”

How Can Experiments Play a Greater Role in Public Policy? 12 Proposals from an Economic Model of Scaling

“…For a comprehensive treatment seeGreenland et al (2016) andCzibor et al (2019) Deke and Finucane (2019). andKaplan (2018) also provide a description of this issue that are friendlier to the general audience.…”

Digital platforms and entrepreneurial support: a field experiment in online mentoring

“…While experimental methods are increasingly popular in entrepreneurship research (see for example, Eesley & Wang, 2017 ; Huizingh & Mulder, 2015 ) laboratory or classroom settings involving students or online survey participants (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) are most common (Hsu et al, 2017 ). Field experiments offer some significant advantages over lab experiments in terms of generalizability and participation bias (Al-Ubaydli & List, 2013 ), but provide researchers with less fine-grained control of the environment in which the experiment is conducted, require higher costs, and often have unforeseen implementation challenges (Czibor et al, 2019 ). However, they have the important advantage of demonstrating how certain interventions may play out under “real world” conditions, which is critical for generalizing to entrepreneurship policy and practice (Huizingh & Mulder, 2015 ).…”