Publi Labo in Ec

The paper is an account of the development of laboratory experimental methods in the early 1970s as influenced by the fields of Public Choice and Social Choice. Just a few key experiments conducted during a period when no experimental markets research was taking place, provide a bridge with the subsequent, rapid, growth of experimental economics. A new focus on public goods and externalities, as opposed to private goods traditionally used in economics experiments, required new representations of the commodity space and preference inducement methods. The importance of voting and collective decision making processes dictated the testing of equilibrium concepts from political science and cooperative game theory. The introduction of Public Choice topics in the 1970s was a major transition in the use of laboratory experimental methods as applied to economics and political science. The transition can be recognized by the change in the focus of laboratory experiments from private sector phenomena (markets, oligopoly, matrix games), to the public sector and by the substantial 1 The comments of Roger Congleton, Morris Fiorina, and Andrej Svorencik are gratefully acknowledged.