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Lessons from a behavioral economics success story: Comment on theory and experiment: What are the questions?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Neilson, William S. |
| Copyright Year | 2010 |
| Abstract | Among the many challenges that Smith (forthcoming) details, one that stands out is that theory and experiments face an incompatibility in the following sense. Theorists propose models which implicitly assume that the situation being modeled is divorced from everything else the individual might encounter, either in the past or in the future. In essence, when they describe the game they preclude consideration of anything outside of the rules. Experimentalists, on the other hand, cannot make this implicit assumption.While they have taken great pains to construct experiments that reflect as closely as possible the games described by theorists, and often these experimental procedures are exceedingly clever, they cannot remove subjects’ pasts or futures. Consequently, economic experiments can never test only the theory they are designed to test; instead, they must test the theory in conjunction with all of the social, cultural, and historical baggage that subjects bring with them. Smith, of course, is right, and his paper provides a call for new research to address this problem. There are several directions that this researchmight go. One is for experimental economists to somehow refine their procedures to isolate the laboratory from the outside world. This, after all, is the technique used in the natural sciences, but one can questionwhether this can ever be achieved for the social sciences. An alternative direction is for theorists to write models that do not isolate rational actors from the rest of the world. Where the first direction lets theorists hold fast and expect experimentalists to adjust, the second direction does the opposite. Something between these two is probably the right answer, and indeed such a coordinated approach, in which theorists address newmodeling questions and experimentalists change their approach to testing theoretical models, was successful in a different part of economics, the study of behavior toward risk. My purpose here is to drawon the lessons from this successful research agenda and use them to develop a newdirection for experimental work on games. |
| Starting Page | 62 |
| Ending Page | 64 |
| Page Count | 3 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.jebo.2008.10.016 |
| Volume Number | 73 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://web.utk.edu/~wneilson/BehavioralSuccessStory.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://web.utk.edu/~wneilson/JEBO-Success.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2008.10.016 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
