ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION Experimental economics has a long history, but in the last decade there has been a proliferation of dedicated laboratories yielding a large body of experimental results (see Roth (1988) for a review of this history). This chapter assesses the contribution of the experimental approach to the neoclassical canon. We set the scene in the next section with a brief discussion of the methodological role of experiments in economics. The third section focuses on the experimental evidence with respect to one aspect of neoclassical economics: its theory of decision-making. These two sections feed directly into the final sections which is concerned with the implications of these results for both method and neoclassical economics.