New NBER paper charts history and future of field experiments in economics 

 The NBER just posted a new working paper by Steven Levitt and John List ``Field Experiments in Economics: The Past, The Present, and The Future.''  I only had a first glance and this paper looks like an easy to read history of field experiments in economics and a (short) summary of the limitations.  Levitt and List also suggest that partnerships with private institutions could be the future of this field.  It seems like a natural conclusion.  Collaborating with the private sector should create more opportunities for good research, and the money and infrastructure will be attractive to researchers.  And anyway what other sector is left to be conquered?  But maybe such partnerships are only useful for certain areas of research  (Levitt and List suggest the setting could be a useful laboratory for the field of industrial organization).  And firms, like any institution, must have an interest to participate.  This might be fine for learning about fundamental economic behavior but will we see more declarations of interest on experiments related to policy? 

  
Levitt, S and List, J (2008) ``Field Experiments in Economics: The Past, The Present, and The Future.'' NBER Working Paper 14356,  http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14356  

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 This study presents an overview of modern field experiments and their usage in economics. Our discussion focuses on three distinct periods of field experimentation that have influenced the economics literature. The first might well be thought of as the dawn of "field" experimentation: the work of Neyman and Fisher, who laid the experimental foundation in the 1920s and 1930s by conceptualizing randomization as an instrument to achieve identification via experimentation with agricultural plots. The second, the large-scale social experiments conducted by government agencies in the mid-twentieth century, moved the exploration from plots of land to groups of individuals. More recently, the nature and range of field experiments has expanded, with a diverse set of controlled experiments being completed outside of the typical laboratory environment. With this growth, the number and types of questions that can be explored using field experiments has grown tremendously. After discussing these three distinct phases, we speculate on the future of field experimental methods, a future that we envision including a strong collaborative effort with outside parties, most importantly private entities.