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SHYAM
SUNDER INTERVIEW WITH WEBPONDO
October 23rd, 2003
Webpondo: It shouldn't come as a surprise that
experimental economics is quite an unknown field
for Colombian economists. Just to warm up the
readers, could you briefly explain us what the
idea of experimental economics is and its importance?
Shyam Sunder: Economics is the science
of interaction between human wants and scarcity
within the context of social institutions. On
aggregation scale, it is bounded by psychology--the
science of individual behavior--at one end, and
sociology at the other. Economists seek to learn
about the outcomes of such interactions under
various circumstances and institutions. Verbal,
mathematical and econometric analyses have been
the traditional tools of this trade, each with
its own advantages and limitations. During the
past half-century, experiments have been added
to this toolbox. Experiments are a especially
powerful means of learning about the role of institutions
in determining the outcomes of economic interactions.
W.P: TCan experimental labs replicate real-life
problems? Specifically: in real life, people regularly
face choice problems with enormous consequences
for them; can one really trust that individuals
who participate in experiments will consider the
situation there as seriously as they would in
real life? For example, in an auction experiment
for sports cards, participants may bid strong
just for the thrill…
S.S.: When we consider the real-life phenomena
in all their fractal detail, they cannot be captured
in entirety either in the lab or in any other
modeling medium. Real life is infinitely detailed,
and no two situations are exactly alike. The very
idea of modeling is to identify some features
of real life as essential for a given purpose,
and discard the rest as mere detail. This is valid
both for mathematics as well as for lab. Experimentalists,
like mathematical economists, try to capture the
essential features to examine the robustness of
the simple models. What is the role of the "thrill"
in an auction for sports cards (as opposed to
the monetary payoffs)? If the thrill is thought
to be an essential feature in real-life auctions,
the lab auction should also try to capture it.
If the model being examined ignores the thrill
factor, and the lab results reveal thrill to be
an important determinant of the outcomes, the
model is shown to be deficient in its explanatory
power. In either case, the lab experiments help
us refine our understanding of real phenomena
through better and simpler ways of capturing their
variation in our models.
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