Law and economics in the laboratory

Experimental methods have become increasingly prominent in the social sciences. While field data are indeed rich and abundant, reflecting a variety of environmental factors, disentangling these factors is difficult, if not impossible. The intertwining of potential causal factors in the field is particularly acute in law and economics. Laboratory experiments have some important advantages over other approaches. The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize the reader with a handful of the vast array of techniques experimentalists use to explore theories related to law and decision-making in (mock) legal environments. The authors describe a set of experiments conducted to study decisions of judges, juries and attorneys and review experiments designed to study the effects of law enforcement. They also describe a set of experiments that study the bargaining behavior of principals and their agents and the role that communication plays in negotiations.