Why lab experiments are a powerful tool for legal scholarship
Many questions formulated by legal scholars address a causal relationship between the law and human behavior: What is the effect of “teaser rates” on credit card debt? Will delegation of decision-making diminish the “stickiness of default rules”? Does a key information document improve retail investors’ understanding of investment products? Behavioral law and economics can help answering these questions, as it provides predictions about people’s behavior in a legally relevant context. Its increasing use in policy-making and law calls for an understanding of how these predictions are formulated and tested. Laboratory experiments are an important empirical method employed to this end. Thus, it comes at no surprise that...
