The Virtual Laboratory Infrstructure for Online Economic Experiments

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview on the Virtual Laboratory infrastructure for online economic experiments. We summerize our experience gained from performing serveral economic experiments on the Internet. The experiments we have run range from electronic markets to individual decision making. From there we synthesize and evaluate a set of methodological issues in performing economic experiments on the Internet. As a result for further exploration we sketch the design of an infrastructure that allows the automated execution of Internet experiments including marketing of experiments, control of application and participation, payment system integration, and evaluation of results. The infrastructure also aims at providing a generic interface for third parties to register and run experiments. We have prototyped the components of this infrastructure and ultimately aim at providing an Internet experiment service for the experimental economic research community.