Economists Almost Always Find It Easy to Conduct Experiments in Order to Test Their Theories

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1Economics has always been regarded as a non experimental science. For instance, John Stuart Mill was one of the first to note that "there is a property common to almost all the moral sciences, and by which they are distinguished from many of the physical; that is, that it is seldom in our power to make experiments in them" (1836, p.124). One hundred years later, Milton Friedman, insisted on the same idea in his famous essay on the methodology of positive economics: "Unfortunately, we can seldom test particular predictions in the social sciences by experiments explicitly designed to eliminate what are judged to be the most important disturbing influences. Generally, we must rely on evidence cast up by the 'experiments' that happen occur" (1953, p.10). Another famous economist, Joan Robinson, agrees with this statement when she writes: "Economists cannot make use of controlled experiments to settle their differences: they have to appeal to historical evidence" (1977, p.1319). Reflecting this quasi-unanimous point of view, most of economics textbooks, even recent ones, emphasize the impossibility to conduct experiments in this discipline. For example, Richard Lipsey states "Experimental sciences, such as chemistry and some branches of psychology, have an advantage because it is possible to produce evidence through controlled laboratory experiments. Other sciences, such as astronomy and economics, cannot do this" [1]. Likewise, in every edition of his "Principles of Economics", Paul Samuelson refers to the incapacity of economists to make experiments. An identical message was expressed after William Nordhaus joined him as a co-author: "economists cannot perform controlled experiments like chemists or biologists because they can't easily control other important factors. Just like astronomists or meteorologists, they usually have to solely use their observation" (1985, p.8) [2]. Even in the early 1990's in the Encyclopedia Britanica, we could still read: "Economics are sometimes confronted with the charge that their discipline is not a science [...] there is no laboratory in which economists can test their hypotheses" [3].

2How should we explain this point of view? The main reason is that in economics — just like in any other social sciences — it is very difficult to claim that an event is the result of one cause only. Most of the time, there are many causes and vice versa, one cause can generate several consequences. In his first experimentation, Chamberlin (1948) — one of the pioneers of experimental economics — stressed that causality was problematic: "it is known that in his choices of methods, the economist can hardly use laboratory techniques like in natural sciences. On one hand, data from the real world is necessarily the product of many influences other than the ones he's trying to isolate. On the other hand, non intentional variables can't be held constant or eliminated in an economics laboratory because the real world of human beings, firms, markets, and governments cannot be reproduced artificially and controlled". He nonetheless wrote his article with "the objective […] to open a small breach in this direction: to describe a real experiment with a 'market' controlled in laboratory conditions" (1948, p. 95). Despite this generalized scepticism concerning the scientific relevance of the experimental approach in economics, this breach opened by Chamberlin, and a handful of psychologists and economists in the years following World War II, has largely widened with time.

3We indeed consider that apart from the pioneer work of the psychologist Leon Thurstone (1931) — who realizes the very first experiment of matters in individual choice in a determinist frame — it is between the end of World War II and the very beginning of the 1960's that experimental economics emerges through some scattered multidisciplinary initiatives (or rare and brief collaborations) that may be identified in the United States and in Europe, mainly in Germany. It is then that those pioneering experiments are held about the three great topics that still greatly structure the research: (i) the "individual decisions" (Rousseas & Hart, 1951; May, 1954; Papandreou, 1953; Papandreou et al., 1957; Rose, 1957, for determinist choices; Mosteller & Nogee, 1951; Allais, 1953; Siegel, 1957, 1959, 1961; Davidson, Suppes & Siegel, 1957; Edwards, 1961, for risky decisions; Ellsberg, 1961, for uncertain decisions), (ii) the "games" (Flood, 1952, 1958; Hoggatt, 1959; Sauermann & Selten, 1959/1960; Siegel & Fouraker, 1960; Fouraker & Siegel, 1963), (iii) the "markets" (Chamberlin, 1948; Smith, 1962) [4].

4In less than half a century, laboratory experiments have known an extraordinary success among economists. Guala (2009) even mentions "one of the most stupefying methodological revolutions in the history of science" (p.152). Though a considerable diffe-rence remains between economics and natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine) about the use of laboratory experiment — which is not surprising when we think that the peculiarity of economic experiments is to bear on human beings' behavior —, we have to acknowledge that this gap has noticeably reduced with time [5]. An author like Charles Plott, during the Sixth Annual Congress of the Southern Economic Association in 1990, did not hesitate to ask "will economics become an experimental science?" (Plott, 1991) About twenty years later, without necessarily answering by the affirmative to this question [6], we can state that "experimental economics" has eventually found its place on the economics research landscape.

5In 2002, the attribution of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science to Vernon Smith — an economist at George Mason University — and Daniel Kahneman — a psychologist at Princeton —, two American researchers who strongly participated in its development, had a large impact in the field. In collaboration with Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974; Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Thaler, 1980), Kahneman developed a psychologist's perspective that contributed to a partial separation of the experimentalist community in the 1980's and gave birth to "behavioral economics".

6The purpose of this new research program differed notably from the ones announced until then by the experimentalists because it initially put in question a "re-establishment" of the microeconomics theory founded on a stronger basis of psychology. As Camerer & Loewenstein (2004) put it, "behavioral economics increases the explanatory power of economics by providing it with more realistic psychological foundations" (p. 3). However, laboratory experiments stay a privileged (but not exclusive) method for empirical investigation. Some authors, like Binmore (1999) and Loewenstein (1999), clearly distinguish "behavioral" and "experimental" economics. Of course, the research programs initiated by Smith and Kahneman differ sensibly with regard to the fundamental assumptions they make and methodology they adopt. Moreover, to appreciate the interest of some methodological reasoning, it is better to dissociate experiments on behaviors and those on markets. Insofar, it seems to be more natural to qualify all types of economic research that use the experimental method as experimental economics (see also Wilkinson, 2008; Bardsley and al., 2010; Lee, 2011, more particularly) [7]. That's why, in the same manner, it seems fair to include in the field of experimental economics the very recent "neuroeconomics", despite the specific methodological issues that this new research program raises. This growth of behavioral economics born at the end of the 1990's in the wake of the cognitive neurosciences revolution indeed uses experimental procedures.

7But if these "scientists in white coats" (according to Starmer's, 1999, expression) have found their place in the economists' community, it is hard to deny that some opposition still exists. Although most of them do not openly criticize the experimental approach, rare are those who don't acknowledge its crucial influence on their professional activity.

8Critics against the experimental method have been numerous and varied from the moment of its introduction in the field of economics and some of them, unfortunately, more often come from prejudices rather than from a real critical analysis. That has in fact darkened the issue by hiding the actual difficulties encountered in the implementation of economic experiments.

9Moreover, several debates have opposed and still oppose today experimentalists themselves. As noted before, from the beginning of the 1980's, a disagreement appeared among them about the rationality of human behavior. Behavioral economists, along the lines of Herbert Simon's thesis, defend the existence of some kind of "bounded" rationality: individuals generally suffer from multiple cognitive biases in judgment and decision making. By contrast, the experimentalists investigating institutions remain faithful to the standard rationality assumption at a collective level: markets compensate for the lack of individual rationality. Other controversies are more technical and sometimes in connection with psychologists. They fill the pages of several scientific journals during the 1980's and 1990's, such as notably the "preference reversal" phenomena, whose stake is important as it contradicts the "invariance procedure" from the standard theory of choices [8]. Some debates lasted as long as almost four decades, like the question of financial incentives (should we or shouldn't we pay experimental subjects in all circumstances?) [9]. The last two controversies involved several renowned experimentalists.

10Recently a controversy opposed Binmore & Shaked (2010) to Fehr & Schmidt (2010) about the actual existence of "social preferences" (i.e. the fact that people do care about the well-being of other human beings), the study of which represents at the moment one of the most important research programs in behavioral economics. Indeed, the stake is of methodological order. For Binmore & Shaked, it is absolutely crucial to put "risk" prediction in terms of Popper's value (i.e. hardly predictable events) concerning future events; every hypothesis formulated post-hoc, once the relevant data has been collected, must be treated with skepticism. Precisely, to Binmore & Shaked, Fehr & Schmidt were engaging in an exercise of "fitting" only and not of "prediction" [10]. In Binmore & Shaked (2007), the authors develop similar yet broader objections concerning inferences that some behavioral economists drew from experimental results. They don't pre-specify a domain for the theory before testing it, they cite as supporting evidences only those tests the theory passed successfully and they allow the theory's parameters to take different values when they are fitted to various experimental data sets. Whatever we might think about this critic of Binmore & Shaked towards some behavioral economic theories, we have to agree with Bardsley and al. (2010) that they draw our attention to one of the unsolved methodological questions of experimental economics: "When experimental evidence reveals systematic deviations from previously received theory, how should economists go about incorporating those findings into new theories? How far can one legitimately generalize from narrowly defined classes of experiment to the whole range of cases to which economic theories are expected to apply?"(p. 11).

11Another recent controversy, between List and Levitt (Levitt & List, 2007a, 2007b, 2008; List, 2011) on one side, and on the other, Camerer (2011), is about the possibility to export the results outside the laboratory in which they have been obtained and of the so-called "superiority" of "field experiments" (i.e. experiments that lay on natural field data though exercising a control to some degree). This thinking about the "generalizability" of experiments to contexts outside the laboratory is at the heart of the actual stakes of experimental economics with the authors speaking of "external validity" of experimental results.

12Generally speaking, apart from the thoughts led by a handful of philosophers of science — among which one must mention Francisco Guala (1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010) —, we observe a deep renewal of the methodological questionings by an increasing number of experimentalists themselves. One of the leaders in this movement is Vernon Smith himself who poses many relevant (but unsettling) methodological questions to the community of experimentalists (see Smith, 2010). If the difficult methodological problems raised by economic experimentation could have legitimately neglected in the rather hostile climate in which the field developed for several decades, the time seems right to openly confront the challenges that it has to face. Moreover, the methodological foundations of experimental economics were built up at a time where its perimeter was far narrower and the decisiveness of experiences way less diversified than today. The subtitle of the last joint publication written by six renowned British experimentalists is in this respect particularly eloquent: Experimental economics - Rethinking the rules (2010) [11].

13This special issue of the Revue de Philosophie Economique / Review of Economic Philosophy is looking to fully enter in this context by gathering some original contributions focused on the methodological aspects of experimental economics and concerning both old issues and new challenges raised by this economic approach. The issue speaks to both non-experimentalists, who don't know experimental economics very well or who still doubt the professional character of the experimental reasoning, and to the experimentalists that have an uncritical reflexion towards their practices and underestimate the methodological stakes of their discipline.

14The issue is made up of six original contributions [12].

15In "Principes méthodologiques et pratiques de l'économie expérimentale : une vue d'ensemble", Daniel Serra gives an overview of the main methodological questions that laboratory economic experimentation encounters by largely borrowing from the two recent works of Guala (2005) and Bardsley and al. (2010) — references that cannot now be ignored for whoever is seeking to have an idea of the interest and the complexity of methodological questions devoted to experimental economics. The paper discusses the bases of the experimental method in general and its adaptation to the study of economic phenomena. It examines the recent philosophical thoughts on the nature of experiments, which consider them as "mediators" between the abstract principles of a scientific theory and empirical reality, and as such, sharing some characteristics with models. It also presents and discusses the main experimental procedures that characterize the good practices of economists — some of them showing great ingenuity — by notably focusing on what distinguishes them from the older ones established by psychologists. It emphasizes the huge progress that was accomplished in a few decades while taking into account the disagreements that still persist between some experimentalists (to pay or not the subjects in all circumstances, for instance) and the ongoing existence of some important "open" questions. In this regard, the paper tries to clarify a major methodological questio-ning which has been approached more seriously only recently: the issue of "external validity" of experimental results. On the matter of knowing if the results are transferable outside the laboratory, the answer must be conditional: it depends on the research question asked. When testing a theory or a hypothesis, the concern of external validity is less concerning than for those experiences that rely on certain empirical regularities in order to infer new knowledge, or for those which are established by the experimentalist as an expert requested by public authorities or big firms.

16In "What to do with a problem like Duhem-Quine?", Martin Jones analyses a question that has largely been discussed by philosophers of science but has only recently be taken in account in experimental economics. In a nutshell, the Duhem-Quine problem refers to the impossibility to empirically test a theory since it is always possible to "save" the theory by adding new "auxiliary" hypothesis (Duhem, 1906; Quine, 1951, 1953). In a clear and well informed discussion, the author shows that none of the approaches recently used in the literature to get around the problem are really satisfying. Some authors, like Bardsley and al. (2010, chap. 3) think that they found a way out by referring to a Lakatosian vision of science, accepting the notion of "theoretical and empirical progress" within a "scientific research program" and between several competitor programs. Others, who we can qualify as "inductivists", like Guala (2005) and Soberg (2005), try to replace the deductive test of theories by an inductive procedure of improvement of the theories — experiments allowing to eliminate hypothesis one after the other. This second approach doesn't accept the "holist" vision of the science adopted by Quine and pleads for the development of a testing procedure that differs from the definite ensembles of hypothesis/experiments. Based on the famous example of the "ultimatum game" in experimental economics, Jones claims that the Lakatosian solution has an enormous cost: the lost of the possibility to reason in terms of "truth" and "objectivity" to start a rational critique of scientific theories. Inductivist solutions, although not suffering from the same flaw, don't matter to him anymore. He doubts that they are really about the Duhem-Quine problem. Therefore, in reality, these authors rejected all local strategies where difficulties are bypassed. So we have a hard time seeing how a strategy of inductive nature, attractive as it may be, might provide an acceptable solution. Facing this assessment, Jones tries to propose a principle as a solution in questioning the holist conception of science developed by Quine, referring to classical critics by Hacking (1986) and Laudan (1996). The basic idea is that science uses auxiliary hypothesis that are not all of the same nature and that don't work at the same level; some refer to the tools that are used, others to some well established theories in other disciplines, and so forth.

17In "Questions of scale in economic experiments", Harro Maas approaches the study of relations between economic experiments and the outside world to experiments under an angle that is seldom chosen on philosophical discussions: the question of scale. It is therefore a largely debated question in the context of establishing a pattern within several disciplines that go from architecture to aeronautics and through earth sciences. However, very few studies link material establishment of a pattern to the experiments in social sciences. The author thinks that this is unfortunate because he sees in it a track able to lead to a better understanding of the specific attributes of economic experimentation. He claims that it is in their treatment of the scale problem that we can apprehend the way in which the experimentalists are trying to achieve a match between the world inside and outside their experiments. His argumentation lies on economic experimentations led at the end of the 1970's and, particularly, the one from Hong & Plott (1982) on the compared efficiency of two rate filing policies for USA inland water transportation, which fits very well to this analysis in terms of scale. The correspondence between the experiment and the real system that is targeted is reached here thanks to the double game of scaling down of the real system in the experiment (by importing certain aspects of the world) and of "fashioning" of the world, that can be imitated. The author claims that the discussions about the external validity of experiments would benefit if the experimentalists would take into account this complex process. In order to put forward the specificities of Hong & Plott's experiment, he compares it to Plott & Smith's experiment (1978), whose ambition is completely different: by reproducing Williams' experiment (1973) on the displayed price system and by comparing it to the system of oral double auction, their only objective is to capture a phenomenon that is reproducible in a laboratory, to "stabilize the facts", without those facts being intended to be explained at the theoretical level, nor without "mimicking" certain facts of the real world. In Plott & Smith's experiment (called "generic" experiment by the author) markets are real and yet abstracts. The posted price rule refers to a pricing rule used in the retail market, but lacks the characteristics of specific retail markets that may make this pricing rule to play out differently in the concrete. Also, real people parti-cipating in a generic experiment may differ from decision making units in the outside world, which may be individuals or collectives. By contrast, the Hong-Plott experiment is real and concrete (it is "specific"): the experiment try to incorporate the concrete and complex circumstances of a specific market in a laboratory setting.

18Focusing on scale issues in experiment design, this paper touches upon issues of external validity. Yet, in contrast with contemporary discussions of external validity, its emphasis is on the material choices to be made to preserve equivalence. Santos (2010), recently, discusses "materiality" in terms of the subject of an economic experiment, whether an experiment is about institutions or behavior. Harro Maas tries to think about materiality in relation to issues of scale.

19Mickaël Cozic, in "Économie « sans esprit » et données cognitives" works on the delicate problem of epistemological relevance of the non-behavioral or "cognitive" data, i.e. data which refer to the processes and cognitive conditions involved in behaviors. Particularly, it is about the response time observed on subjects submitted to certain tasks, the verbal protocols, retracing what the subjects say about the deliberation that led them to this or that decision, the eye-tracking or the neuronal data underlying the decisions through all the modern tools nowadays employed in neuroscience (for example, imaging by functional magnetic resonance). What status should be given to this experimental data of a new kind? This question has become the object of controversies among "cognitive" economics. The disagreement crystallizes largely on the nature of the relationships between cognitive data and economic models of choice. After the criticisms formulated by Gul & Pesendorfer (2005/2008) against economic works that used this cognitive data, a very active methodological literature has developed. The author starts with a reconstruction and a discussion of the arguments put forth by Gul & Pesendorfer. Then, he puts forward what he considers to be a real difficulty that he qualifies as the "missing links problem": the usual models chosen typically do not say anything about the neurological mechanisms at stake in the decision making process. According to him, the problem is underestimated by neuroeconomists. Insofar, it does not seem so severe to him that he wouldn't make possible the principle of epistemological relevance of cognitive data for the models of choice.

20The last two papers deal more specifically with "behavioral game theory". They illustrate one of the major questions raised by behavioral economics: once experimentalists observed that the subjects' behaviors do not validate the theory they test, how to proceed to find a new theory able to explain these data? Among the answers found in the literature, two of them deserve attention: (i) the first one involves "learning", meaning changing behavior through experience, a process not taken account by the standard theory (ii) the other answer amounts to introducing other-regarding behavior and "social preferences".

21Claude Meidinger and Antoine Terracol's paper is entitled: "Learning in the trust game". It deals with the first of these answers proposed in the behavioral literature in order to explain data that do not fit into the standard theory. The article focuses on the well known "trust game" in a simplified simultaneous version and uses an "in partner" design including 25 rounds. Each of the subjects is always paired with the same partner but the roles change: they are either in a situation to send a trust signal ("trustor"), or in a situation to receive such a signal ("trustee"). This allows a differentiation of the learning processes of the two types of players. The data comes from an experiment completed in 1999 in the experimental economics laboratory of Grenoble. The authors rely on two learning models known in behavioral games literature: (i) the "Experience-Weighted-Attraction" (EWA) model, that presents the advantage of being able to take into account both the fact that the players' decisions can reflect the success of the strategies they have chosen before ("reinforcement-based learning") and the history of how others played ("believe-based learning") (ii) the Cheung & Friedman's model (1997), that reveals the beliefs and the updating processes of beliefs staying hidden in the EWA model. Some simulations are also made in order to test the robustness of both learning models, i.e. to appraise their ability to track the data in order to obtain simulated predictions on a larger time scale than the 25 rounds. These long run simulations establish that the interaction of the two estimated types of players can lead to contrasted outcomes.

22This paper is interesting from a methodological point of view: it shows how experiments, estimation of structural econometric models and simulations can interact to shed light on individual behavior in prototypical contexts and their long-run implications.

23In "Mesure et caractéristique de l'attention à l'autre en situation d'interaction stratégique : l'apport de l'économie expérimentale", Stéphane Robin goes back to one of the leading research programs in behavioral game theory: the "social preferences" program. To characterize this program, let us note that in some contexts, the observed behaviors of some experimental subjects can be interpreted as "anomalies", i.e. they don't respect standard "rational" rules of behavior (in particular they support more cooperation than the standard models predict). How should we explain this phenomenon? Several authors claim that in distributional contexts people generally care about the other players' payoffs and not only about their own payoff. They are interested by the final distributions (Bolton & Ockenfels, 2000; Fehr & Schmidt, 1999, for instance) and/or they are not indifferent concerning how distributions come about (Rabin, 1993, for instance). The paper shows how experimental economics has provided an accurate measure and further characterization of these special preferences. It relies on a very selective review of experiences for highlighting the fruitful dialogue which was established between the analysis of behavior in laboratory and theory about this question. Three competing hypothesis are retained for explaining observed behaviors: altruism, equity and fairness, reciprocity. The author shows that equity and fairness norms seem to play a central role in the subjects' assessment of the issues of the bargaining. Yet equity is integrated in an overall analysis of the game that stays strategic. On this point, reciprocity seems to be the leading component of social preferences.

Notes

• [1]

  The quote from Lipsey is taken from Starmer (1999, p.1).

• [2]

  Therefore, we have to mention that the actual position of Samuelson concerning economic experimentation has singularly evolved given that almost an entire page of the last edition of his famous manual is devoted to this method.

• [3]

  The quote from the Encyclopedia Britanica (1991) is taken from Davis & Holt (1993, p.4).

• [4]

  We can find introductions to the history of experimental economics, and in particular of the early works, in Smith (1991), Roth (1993, 1995) and Moscati (2007). Guala (2009) and Serra (2012) give a broader insight.

• [5]

  We know that experimental tradition in science goes back to around 1600 with the first physics experiments (Bacon, Galileo). Chemistry emerged as an experimental science two centuries later. And biology, long considered as incapable of carrying out experiments because focused on life itself, will only become experimental after the second half of the xix ^th century (Mendel, Pasteur). Psychology, finally, was the first science to carry out with experiments on the beginning of the xx ^th century, half a century before economy.

• [6]

  We share in this way the point of view of many clear-sighted experimentalists like Smith, Roth, Bardsley, Cubitt, Loomes, Starmer or Sugden, who doubt that a majority of non experimentalist economists consider that the economy is now an experimental science (see Smith, 2002; Roth, 2010; Bardsley and al., 2010, chap. 2).

• [7]

  From the rest of first range behavioral economists that are on the editorial comity of the journal "Experimental Economics", created in 1998 by Charles Holt to host only works from experimentalists. They are even present on the comity of the "Economic Science Association" (ESA) (even assure its presidency), this international association created in 1996 in order to promote the development of experimental economics and which organizes every year an international Symposium, matched with regional symposiums in the USA, Europe and Japan.

• [8]

  See Seidl (2002) for a survey on the preferences reversal phenomena.

• [9]

  See for example Read (2005), Guala (2005, chap. 11), Etchart-Vincent (2006), Bardsley et al. (2010, chap. 6).

• [10]

  The controversy, as a matter of older fact, first took a rather polemical turn. See Shaked (2005), who criticizes the pioneer paper of Fehr & Schmidt (1999) but also their lecture invited to the World Congress of the Economic Society (Fehr & Schmidt, 2003) as well as the answer from Fehr & Schmidt (2005).

• [11]

  Bardsley, Cubitt, Loomes, Moffatt, Starmer & Sugden (2010). The project is however not to the taste of everyone, as evidenced by the comments by Binmore (2011), Harrison (2011) and Ross (2011). See also the authors' answer: Bardley and al. (2011).

• [12]

  I would like to thank the economists and the philosophers who helped me with the refereeing of these papers.

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