Expecon topic selection

Topic Selection (expecon-topic-selection)

When to trigger

• You have an interesting economic question but are unsure an experiment is the right tool — or whether this journal is the right home for it
• The draft reads topic-first ("a paper about charitable giving") rather than method-first ("a design that isolates warm-glow from social-image motives")
• You must decide before collecting data whether to pre-register, run a Registered Report, or pursue a replication
• The paper could plausibly land at JEBO, GEB, AEJ: Micro, or JESA and you need to pick deliberately

The fit decision: method first, topic second

Experimental Economics is the ESA method flagship. The editors do not ask "is this topic important?" so much as "is this the cleanest experiment that could answer this question, and does the design itself teach the field something?" Three questions decide fit:

1. Is the object causal and behavioral? The unit of contribution is a treatment effect produced by experimental control, not an observed correlation or a calibrated structural object. If your answer lives in field-survey data, you are at an applied journal, not here.
2. Is the design the contribution, or merely a delivery vehicle? Papers that win at ExpEcon either (a) build a novel, decisive treatment contrast that prior work could not run, or (b) advance the methodology of experimentation (a better elicitation, a control that removes a confound, evidence on how a procedure biases results). A standard dictator game with a new label rarely clears the bar.
3. Can it pass the two gates from day one? Real salient incentives and the no-deception norm are not editorial preferences; they are entry conditions. If the question can only be answered by deceiving subjects or with hypothetical stakes, redesign or send it elsewhere.

Choosing the treatment contrast (this is where the paper is won)

The center of an ExpEcon paper is the minimal pair: two conditions identical except for the one thing your hypothesis is about. Spend your design budget here.

• Strip the contrast to a single manipulated dimension; a treatment that changes payoffs and framing and matching identifies nothing.
• Pre-commit to the primary outcome and primary comparison in a pre-analysis plan (AEA RCT Registry / OSF / AsPredicted). For high-stakes or surprising claims, consider a Registered Report: in-principle acceptance before data collection insulates a clean null from publication bias and is increasingly welcomed in the ESA ecosystem (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准).
• Decide matching (partner vs. stranger), information, and one-shot vs. repeated now — these are identification choices, not implementation details.

Sibling boundary — pick the right home deliberately

Venue	What it rewards	Send there instead when…
JEBO	broad behavioral/organizational questions, method-agnostic	the topic, not the design, is the contribution; you need deception
GEB	game-theoretic theory	the experiment merely illustrates a theorem
AEJ: Micro	applied micro where an experiment supports a wider claim	the headline is an economic phenomenon, the experiment one leg
JESA	short-format ESA work: replications, null results, software, comments	the paper is a brief note, not a full design paper

Deciding the experiment type (it changes everything downstream)

The same question can be a lab, lab-in-the-field, or field experiment, and the choice fixes your later bottlenecks:

Type	Buys you	Costs you	Choose when
Lab	maximal control, clean minimal pairs, cheap iteration	external validity questions (often student pool)	the mechanism needs tight control to isolate
Lab-in-the-field	a relevant population with much control retained	recruitment/logistics, some control loss	the population is the point (farmers, traders, CEOs)
Field	behavior in situ, strong external validity	partial control, attrition, often costlier	the real-world stakes are the contribution

Lab control is your comparative advantage at this journal; do not give it up unless the population or the in-situ behavior is the contribution.

Checklist

• The contribution is stated as a treatment effect / design advance, not a topic
• The minimal-pair contrast manipulates exactly one dimension
• Both gates clear at the idea stage: salient incentives feasible; no deception required
• Pre-registration / Registered Report / replication status decided before data collection
• A one-line reason this belongs at ExpEcon and not JEBO/GEB/AEJ: Micro/JESA
• Primary outcome and primary comparison named before any results exist
• Experiment type (lab / lab-in-field / field) chosen for a stated reason

The "could you publish a clean null?" test

A useful litmus for ExpEcon fit: imagine your treatment effect comes out exactly zero. Is the paper still publishable? If yes — because the design is decisive, the hypotheses were pre-registered, and a null adjudicates between behavioral models — you have a true method-defined contribution. If a null would be unpublishable because the paper rests entirely on getting a "surprising positive," you are leaning on the result, not the design, and you risk a publication-bias incentive to p-hack. The flagship (and especially the Registered Report track) values designs whose answer matters either way. Build the question so the null is informative.

Anti-patterns

• A "topic paper" with an experiment bolted on, where the design teaches nothing new
• A treatment that varies several things at once, so no single effect is identified
• Discovering only after data collection that the design needed deception to work
• Choosing the journal by impact factor rather than by method fit
• Treating a brief replication or software note as a full ExpEcon design paper (that is JESA)

Worked vignette (illustrative)

A team has "a paper on whether social media reduces cooperation." Topic-first, and unidentifiable as stated. Reframing method-first: design a repeated public-goods game where one treatment injects a between-round "feed" of (real, not fabricated — gate!) peer messages and the control does not. Now the contribution is a treatment effect of peer messaging on contributions, the minimal pair manipulates only the feed, incentives are real, no deception is needed (messages are genuine), and a pre-registered primary comparison (mean contribution, Feed vs. NoFeed, at the matching-group level) exists before any data. The vague topic became a clean ExpEcon design.

Output format

【Journal】Experimental Economics (ESA method flagship)
【Skill】expecon-topic-selection
【Verdict】fit / reframe / reroute
【The contribution】treatment effect or design/method advance (one sentence)
【Experiment type】lab / lab-in-field / field + reason
【Minimal-pair contrast】the single manipulated dimension
【Gate check】incentives salient? no deception? [Y/N]
【Pre-reg status】PAP / Registered Report / replication / none-yet
【Why here not sibling】JEBO/GEB/AEJ:Micro/JESA reason
【Next skill】expecon-literature-positioning