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...

We design a laboratory experiment to explore whether and how property endogenously arises in a specialization and exchange environment where "theft" is costless. Additional treatments make available optional private protection mechanisms. We find that although an absence of exogenous enforcement...

We report 28 new experiment sessions consisting of up to three experience levels to examine the robustness of learning and "error" elimination among participants in a laboratory asset market and its effect on price bubbles. Our answer to the title question is: "yes." We impose a large increase...