The Virtual Laboratory Infrastructure for Online Economic Experiments

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview on the Virtual Laboratory infrastructurefor online economic experiments. We summarize our experience gainedfrom performing several economic experiments on the Internet. The experimentswe have run range from electronic markets to individual decision making. Fromthere we synthesize and evaluate a set of methodological issues in performing economicexperiments on the Internet. As a result for further exploration we sketch thedesign of an infrastructure that allows the automated execution of Internet experimentsincluding marketing of experiments, control of application and participation,payment system integration, and evaluation of results. The infrastructure also aimsat providing a generic interface for third parties to register and run experiments.We have prototyped the components of this infrastructure and ultimately aim atproviding an Internet experiment service for the experimental economic researchcommunity.