A Web‐lab to enhance social science infrastructure: experiments, simulations and archiving

Reports on a project to create a new infrastructure for experimental economics and sociology by connecting cutting edge research to Web‐based software development. The project will build and maintain an active Web site of highly flexible modular architecture for theoretically‐driven experimentation. The Web site, itself a laboratory, fundamentally advances experimental study, automatically records and archives data, and maintains electronic journals. To increase the integrity and effectiveness of social science knowledge acquisition, the Web site will support replications while creating large and systematic databases. The Web‐lab’s goal is to change social science investigation by allowing experiments to be run using subjects from large and diverse populations. The Web‐lab will democratize experimental research; a local laboratory will need no more than a few computers with access to the Web. Using designs at the Web‐lab, extensive laboratory components will be developed for mainstream graduate and undergraduate social science courses.