LABEXNET: Internet-based Laboratory for Experimental Economics

Abstract

Experimental Economists have designed over the years a wide range of scientific experiments that can be usefully employed nowadays as teaching aids. The interactive and participatory nature of such experiments serves as a motivation to students, stimulates their own thinking, and enhances their insights into the forces that drive economic markets: the aggregate interactions of economic agents within a market institution. Economic classroom games have been recognised as useful teaching tools for decades, and they have often produced surprising results and better understanding of market dynamics and institutions. Nowadays the new information technologies can be brought into play to conduct and analyse experimental games in unprecedented ways: using Internet-based tools, the design, execution and analysis of classroom games can be made considerably easier than traditionally. In this paper we introduce LABEXNET, a program designed to conduct Internet-based economic classroom games. LABEXNET is freely available to the academic community.