 2. During the past decades, laboratory experimentation in economics has expanded rapidly. Laboratory experimentation has many different objectives (see Roth 1988) and apparently holds out the prospect of bridging the gulf between fundamental economic theory and empirical evidence. Some of it casts light on the way in which methodological commitments influence the extent to which economists heed empirical evidence. A good deal of laboratory experimentation in contemporary economics is in the service of behavioral economics, which prides itself on heeding experimental evidence concerning the structure and determinants of individual choices. Although behavioral economics has secured a foothold within mainstream economics, it remains controversial substantively and methodologically, and its implications for normative economics, discussed below in section 6, are controversial.