Exclusion and Cooperation in Experiments

Abstract

Laboratory experiments are a useful way of gathering observations about human decision-making in controlled environments. A careful experimental design can give valuable indications about human decisionmaking in economic environments outside the laboratory. Experimental data is in general replicable and is less prone to problems of missing observations and measurement errors, compared to empirical data collected in the field. The experimental method is especially useful to explore dynamics of behavior in situations for which empirical observations are otherwise difficult to collect, for example, the dynamics of behavior in social and economic networks.