policymakers demonstrate

590 Barcellan, Bøegh Nielsen, Calsamiglia, Camerer, Cantillon et al.
to today’s policy problems. Instead, there should be clear guidelines for review
panels analysing renewal requests.
Relatedly, and as the experience of SHARE shows, decentralized funding
schemes are a serious threat to the sustainability of longitudinal and international
databases. Not all national governments are equally interested in
evidence-based research, which implies that it is almost impossible to obtain
funding in these countries. This pleads for centralized funding for this type of
international data collection projects.
Private funding can play a crucial role during the earlier stages of large-scale
data collection projects. In contrast to public sources of research funding, private
foundations are more flexible. They are more mission and people-oriented,
and are therefore willing to take more risks and accept longer time horizons. Private
funding has played a crucial role in the success of UMETRICS. Likewise,
the US Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics programme (LEHD) had
been funded for 20 years by private funds before becoming a national (publicly
funded) statistical programme in 2008.
13.5 Data Generation in Controlled Environments
By Colin Camerer, Bruno Crépon, and Georg Kirchsteiger
For a long time, economics has been considered a nonexperimental science,
and empirical work was done only with field data. This has changed drastically
during the last four decades when more and more economists have begun
to conduct experiments. One can distinguish between two types of economic
experiments: Laboratory experiments and randomized control trials (RCTs) in
field settings. This section describes both methods, their contributions to economics
and recent developments in methods and applications of these two kinds
of experiments.
13.5.1 Laboratory Experiments
The basic idea of a lab experiment is simple: Participants are put into an
artificially-designed and controlled economic situation in which they make
decisions. The canonical experimental design creates endowments and induced
preferences over outcomes, and specifies a set of rules which compile participants’
choices into outcomes. The rules can be very simple, in decision-making
experiments, or specify a game-theoretic or market structure in more complicated
experiments. The target of discovery is what choices people actually
make.
Lab experimental situations are ‘real’ in the sense that the participants’
decisions have an impact on the rewards they receive for participation in the