The post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for investigating and intervening in social reality. A particular group of these, exemplified here by the experiments of Moreno, Lewin, Bion, Milgram and Zimbardo, worked by establishing suggestive...

Sometimes regulators become experimenters: they try ideas out before implementing them, put novel schemes to the test in order to predict their likely impact, or conduct pilot programmes before executing new policies. Regulators find experiments very expedient, as they allow them to forecast the...

Experiments play a crucial role in contemporary policy-making, yet their political and epistemological dimensions have been neglected in studies of regulatory practice. This article offers an initial examination of the uses of experiments in regulation. It analyses two examples: the partial...