2022, Economic and Political Studies, DOI: 11 (3): 350 – 364; with Alice Guerra, Sven Steinmo & John D’Attoma.
This paper addresses an area of growing concern for laboratory researchers: are subjects’
behaviours affected by prior experiences in laboratory experiments? We address the
question with a large and highly diverse international dataset, and an operationalization
strategy that allows our findings to cohere with previous work while shedding new light
for future research. The findings presented here are drawn from original data gathered as
part of one of the largest tax compliance experiments ever conducted, involving more than
3,000 participants in six countries, across 16 different laboratories. Our results reveal that
subjects’ behaviour correlates with their past experimental experiences, in a way that could
bias results and compromise a study’s external validity; however, this change in behaviour
due to experience occurs only after subjects have participated in at least two previous
laboratory experiments. Our findings have implications not just for tax compliance