Virtual Experiments and Environmental Policy

We develop the concept of virtual experiments and consider their application to environmental policy. A virtual experiment combines insights from virtual reality in computer science, naturalistic decision-making from psychology, and field experiments from economics. The environmental policy applications of interest to us include traditional valuation tasks and less traditional normative decision-making. The methodological objective of virtual experiments is to bridge the gap between the artefactual controls of laboratory experiments and the naturalistic domain of field experiments or direct field studies. This should provide tools for policy analysis that combine the inferential power of replicable experimental treatments with the natural “look and feel” of a field domain. * Cognitive Sciences Program, Department of Philosophy (Fiore); Department of Economics, College of Business Administration (Harrison and Rutström); and School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Hughes), all at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. We thank the U.S. National Science Foundation for research support under NSF/HSD 0527675; Miko Charbonneau, Mark Colbert, Jared Johnson, Jaakko Konttinen, Greg Tener and Shabori Sen for research assistance; and James Brenner, Don Carlton, Zach Prusak and Walt Thomson for helpful comments.