A Structural Perspective on the Experimentalist School
Abstract
What has always bothered me about the "experimentalist" school is the false sense of certainty it conveys. My view, like Leamer's, is that there is no way to escape the role of assumptions in statistical work, so our conclusions will always be contingent. Hence, we should be circumspect about our degree of knowledge. I present some lessons for economics from the field of marketing, a field where broad consensus has been reached on many key issues over the past twenty years. In marketing, 1) the structural paradigm is dominant, 2) the data are a lot better than in some fields of economics, and 3) there is great emphasis on external validation. Of course, good data always helps. I emphasize that the ability to do controlled experiments does not obviate the need for theory, and finally I address different approaches to model validation.Download Info
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Article provided by American Economic Association in its journal Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Volume (Year): 24 (2010)
Issue (Month): 2 (Spring)
Pages: 47-58
Note: DOI: 10.1257/jep.24.2.47
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Related research
Keywords:Find related papers by JEL classification:
- B41 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Economic Methodology
- C01 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - General - - - Econometrics
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Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Sean Muller, 2012. "Econometric methods and Reichenbach's principle," SALDRU Working Papers 85, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
- Niu, Yongzhi, 2010. "Taxpayers' Response to Warnings of a Possible Tax Audit: Do They Change Their Compliance Behavior?," MPRA Paper 25551, University Library of Munich, Germany.
- Bolle, Friedel & Breitmoser, Yves & Otto, Philipp E., 2011. "A positive theory of cooperative games: The logit core and its variants," MPRA Paper 32918, University Library of Munich, Germany.
- David I. Stern, 2011. "From Correlation to Granger Causality," Crawford School Research Papers 1113, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
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