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This article summarizes a small part of the literature on laboratory experiments in political economy. The experiments discussed are primarily aimed at testing predictions of equilibrium models of voting in committees & elections. The specific topics discussed are voter turnout, the Condorcet jury theorem, & the swing voter's curse. The latter two topics address questions of information aggregation by voting rules. All the experiments find significant evidence of strategic voting &, with a few exceptions, find support for the equilibrium predictions of the theories. Adapted from the source document.

This article summarizes a small part of the literature on laboratory experiments in political economy. The experiments discussed are primarily aimed at testing predictions of equilibrium models of voting in committees and elections. The specific topics discussed are voter turnout, the Condorcet jury theorem, and the swing voter's curse. The latter two topics address questions of information aggregation by voting rules. All the experiments find significant evidence of strategic voting and, with a few exceptions, find support for the equilibrium predictions of the theories.

The ability to cumulate and compare findings from laboratory experiments is impeded by the wide variety of designs employed in these studies and by the different incentive characteristics embedded in those designs. This article attempts to improve potential for comparing findings by proposing variables that specify incentive features of collective action designs. For many designs as seemingly disparate as those in prisoner's dilemma, commons dilemma, and public goods provision games, these specifications should enable different designs to be represented as values along common incentive parameters. With this procedure, the influence of incentives can be assessed and controlled across disparate experimental designs as well as the cumulative influence of other variables (for example, group size and identity, framing, and socioeconomic characteristics of subjects) that provoke collective action behavior. The article also notes the limitations of this procedure and other obstacles to the meaningful cumulation of findings on collective action. The procedure may not, for example, allow easy comparison of findings from experimental designs that have disparate nonlinear returns to cost contributions.

ABSTRACT**:  This paper assesses the contribution of laboratory experiments to the economics of design applied to the electricity industry. The analysis is dedicated to wholesale markets, and reviews the results accumulated to date concerning both the general architecture of power markets and the very details of the market rules or institution, that is the auction rule. We argue that these experimental results contribute to a better understanding of the performances properties and implementation features of competitive market designs and that experimental economics has proven very useful to public authorities to inform the restructuring of the electricity industry. It thus confirms the role of experimental economics as a complement to theoretical approaches in the design effort.