Abstract
This chapter presents the essence and characteristics of the economic experiment as well as the strong and weak points of its practical use. Moreover, three most commonly applied classifications along with their subclasses are synthetically described. This methodological overview gives the idea how fast this underestimated scientific method has been developing, thus contributing to the advancement of experimental economics. That the constantly changing reality generates demand for new solutions and for new cognitive methods, so the scientific world strives to meet this demand by coming up with new types of experiments or discovering innovative applications of the existing ones.
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Notes
- 1.
Cause-and-effect relationships between events are relationships that, under conditions of a controlled experiment, lead to an observed sequence of events outlined by a given experiment design (Nowak 1957).
- 2.
It is worth remembering that the goods used in laboratory experiments are usually artificial, abstract and virtual and that their value is determined by the investigator.
- 3.
Observation of two groups is conducted in order to compare them in reference to Y, whilst observations in two time periods enable the experimenter to find out if a properly conducted interference with the factor X has caused a change in the treatment group.
- 4.
The experimenter is obliged to guarantee the same experiment conditions and the same level of factors used for manipulation.
- 5.
It is worth noting that in the case of a field experiment, the experimenter deals with real goods of a certain natural value, usually not known to them, such as satisfaction from supporting earthquake survivors or from making a handmade patchwork quilt.
- 6.
A Latin square of order n is a square matrix of order n with numbers given by a set {1,2,3,…,n−1,n}, where no row or column contains the same number twice. Latin squares are used in statistical experimental planning. Sometimes, instead of a set of {1,2,3,…,n} we talk about n values. The Latin square analysis was pioneered by Leonhard Euler, who used Latin characters as symbols (Penszko 2011).
- 7.
The factorial analysis is a statistical method used to find structures in a set of random variables. Two kinds of approach are used in this analysis: the exploratory factor analysis (AFA), where initially unknown factors are determined by means of an analysis of random variable values, and the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), where we assume the existence of a specific set of factors and, thanks to the analysis of random variable values, we test whether our assumption is viable. Then we estimate the parameters of our model (StatSoft 2006).
- 8.
The factorial design is very popular in psychological studies, especially in the events structure analysis conducted by means of surveys.
- 9.
The strong points of this approach are the opportunity to reflect freely path dependencies amongst the variables as well as to reflect the theoretical construct as a delayed variable (Bagozzi and Yi 2012).
- 10.
We may consider Laibenstein’s Homo RS model as the pioneering experiment of this type.
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Kryk, B. (2016). Sorts and Types of Experiment. In: Nermend, K., Łatuszyńska, M. (eds) Selected Issues in Experimental Economics. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28419-4_3
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