Challenges in Experimental Economics: Discussions based on a field study among fishermen

Abstract

Experimental economics has in later decades evolved to become a part of the economics science and is now steadily reported in economics journals. But there are still debates going on in this field; these debates regard for example whether theory should be revised due to findings from experiments, whether experiments should be conducted in the laboratory or in the field in addition to debates regarding methodological aspects. In this thesis we will focus on some of these debates in addition to the challenges that arise when setting out to conduct experiments in economics. Our discussions are based on previous literature and our own experiences from a field study that we conducted in collaboration with Therese Lindahl, Ann-Sophie Crépin and Caroline Schill from the Beijer institute in Stockholm. They have done laboratory experiments concerning common-pool resources using standard subjects, and we did the same experiment using Norwegian fishermen as our non-standard subjects. The main goal of this thesis is to try to pin down why experiments are still a divided topic in the economics science and what the main challenges are when implementing experiments to economics research.