Experimental Economics from the Vantage-Point of Behavioural Economics

Abstract This paper was published in 1999, a few years before Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. Many of us in the field of behavioral economics suspected that a Nobel Prize was in the works for our field, and we worried that it would be jointly conferred on behavioral economics and experimental economics by people who couldn’t tell the difference between them. The paper starts by pointing out that behavioral economics and experimental economics are entirely different enterprises. Behavioral economics is the application of insights from psychology (and sometimes other disciplines) to economics. Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to economics.