Experimental economics: individual, strategic, and social behavior - Introduction.

Summary The last twenty-five years have seen a revival of empirical methods in many areas of economic analysis. Among these, an increasingly important place has been given to the use of experimental methods, in particular as a privileged empirical tool for studying the new perspectives offered by behavioral economics. The expansion of empirical methods that has followed this movement, and the accumulation of a number of significant results, has led Economic News to propose an overview of this literature, not only to present its premises and draw an intermediate assessment, but also to present its perspectives. Strictly speaking, the methods of experimental economics employ the principles of the experimental method, inspired by the natural sciences, to evaluate the predictions of economic models by focusing more particularly on individual behaviour. The pillars on which this method is based are traditionally three in number. The first pillar is the control of the environment in which individual choices are made. In a laboratory experiment, the researcher tries to control as much as possible the context in which economic agents make their decisions, in order to isolate the effect of a particular treatment. Typically, the experimental method makes it possible to specify in a fine and precise manner the institutions of exchange and the form of social interactions, the modes of presentation of choices and the scales of response in order to best control the choice environment. The second pillar is the control of the random assignment of participants to different treatments. This second pillar is fundamental to the identification of treatment effects and the underlying empirical evaluation that is hoped for. The third and most contested pillar relies on the presence of monetary incentives to ensure that choices made in the laboratory are associated with real economic consequences.