Introduction

Experiments. Law. Economics. Those three words taken by themselves encompass vast parts of the human intellectual experience. Even when we link them together as Experimental Law and Economics, we see a large and diverse body of inquiry over the last half century. We are pleased to add to that body of knowledge with the papers in this volume.

It is not difficult to find the historical and natural linkages among “experiments,” “law,” and “economics.” Christian church patriarch Lactantius in the fourth century A.D. connected the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s edict on prices to observable economic outcomes.¹ Adam Smith famously debated the wisdom of laws against people of the same trade gathering together. And, almost 2,000 years after Lactantius, contemporary empirical work on the economic effects of wage controls (the minimum wage) could fill several of these volumes.