Economic experiments interact with economic theories in various ways. First of all they are used to test economic theories. However, they can neither confirm nor falsify them in a strict sense. They rather inform us about the range of applicability, the robustness and the predictive power of a...

The notion of face-to-face contacts has recently become very popular in regional economics and in economic geography. This is the most obvious way to explain why firms still locate in proximity to others after the "death of distance", i.e., the shrinking costs for transportation, especially...

In experimental economics there exists a lively debate about the independence of observations. Although opinions on the issue differ widely, all concerns regard the independence of subjects' behavior within one session or experiment. This paper attempts to shed some light on the independence of...

Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

Social preference research has fundamentally changed the way economists think about many important economic and social phenomena. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self-selected students as participants. This is potentially...

Ökonomische Experimente sind eine bislang selten verwendete Forschungsmethode im Bereich der agrarpolitischen Analyse. Dieser Beitrag erörtert die Grundlagen von Experimenten, vergleicht sie mit anderen Forschungsmethoden und zeigt ein mögliches Anwendungsgebiet für die Agrarpolitikanalyse...

The quadratic scoring rule (QSR) is often used to guarantee an incentive compatible elicitation of subjective probabilities over events. Experimentalists have regularly not been able to ensure that subjects fully comprehend the consequences of their actions on payoffs given the rules of the...

Experimental and behavioral economics are well established branches in the economic science. This essay presents and discusses some results and behavioral regularities from these fields which are of potential importance for public policy. After a brief introduction of what experimental and...

In this note, we present a novel computerized real effort task based on moving sliders across a screen which overcomes many of the drawbacks of existing real effort tasks. The task was first developed and used by us in Gill and Prowse (American Economic Review, forthcoming). We outline the...

Why do people in rich countries not transfer more of their income to people in the world's poorest countries? To study this question and the relative importance of needs, entitlements, and nationality in people's social preferences, we conducted a real effort fairness experiment where people in...