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The article identifies a latent debate in the recent literature on the role and worth of experiments in economics and other social sciences concerning the relationship between the external and the internal validity of experimental designs. Our work identifies two incompatible views regarding the relationship between internal and external validity of experiments. While in the methodological literature references to the idea that there is a trade-off between the internal and external validity of experiments abound, this view coexists with the position stating that internal validity is rather a prerequisite of external validity. By identifying the contours of this implicit debate in the recent methodological literature around the use of experiments in the social sciences we call attention upon a series of insufficiently conceptualized issues regarding the central notions of internal and external validity and we question the standard view positing a trade-off between the two. This article stands against common associations of internal validity and external validity with the distinction between field and laboratory experiments and assesses critically the arguments that link the artificiality of experimental settings done in the laboratory with the purported trade-off between internal and external validity.
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References found in this work BETA
Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics.Nancy Cartwright (ed.) - 2007 - Cambridge University Press.
Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference.William R. Shadish - 2001 - Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Connecting Economic Models to the Real World: Game Theory and the Fcc Spectrum Auctions.Anna Alexandrova - 2006 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (2):173-192.
Experimental Localism and External Validity.Francesco Guala - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (5):1195-1205.
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2009-08-03
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2009-08-03
Total views
710 ( #7,768 of 2,421,422 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
3 ( #249,228 of 2,421,422 )
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