Professionals versus Students ∗ Guillaume

Most economic theories make general claims. That is, economic models rarely start with assumptions such as: the firms are picnic tables producers in Korea... Hence, whenever one engages in applied work testing a model, there will be issues of generalizability of the results to other data sets, environments, subject population, etc. Such concerns extend to experimental data sets since, in particular, subjects tend to be undergraduate students while much of economic activity outside the laboratory is done by professionals. This paper establishes what is known about the impact of the specific subject sample typically used in experimental economics by reviewing prior studies that have used both the standard subject pool as well as an unusual pool of professionals. Hence, two questions immediately come to mind: 1) why make comparisons across subject pools? and 2) what is the usual subject pool and what are professionals? Which are some of the reasons why a researcher might want to study a non-standard subject pool?