Experimental Exploration into Macroeconomics

Economics, long thought beyond the reach of experimentation, began gradually to yield some of its inaccessible secrets to laboratory and field investigations over the past century. Observation and analyses of laboratory games have led economists to think about markets as social artifacts, whether evolved or designed, to achieve predictable outcomes in specified environments. The value of potential insights into properties of macro economic models and policies had to overcome the barrier of virtual impossibility of conducting controlled experiments at macro economic scale. Fortunately, micro models of macro phenomena have allowed experiments to identify the more plausible from sets of multiple or indeterminate outcomes, and assess policy alternatives and institutional designs. Without attempting a comprehensive survey, this paper summarizes some important discoveries from experimental economics, with special emphasis on macro economics. Challenges ahead are mentioned briefly.