Economics and Philosophy, 29 (2013) 151–153 C  Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0266267113000163 EXPERIMENTS IN ECONOMICS AND PHILOSOPHY Not so long ago, many economists and philosophers felt that their disciplines had no use for experimental methods. An experimental study was, by its nature, ‘not economics’ or ‘not philosophy’ – psychology maybe. Opinion has changed dramatically. This issue of Economics and Philosophy represents a collection of recent contributions to experimental research that explicitly deal with empirical findings or methodological questions in the intersection of the two disciplines. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first such collection dedicated to addressing these common interests. The Editors of this special issue, James Konow and Eric Schwitzgebel, have selected six papers from the 2011 conference in San Sebastián, Spain on Experiments in Economics, Experiments in Philosophy organized by Cristina Bicchieri, Jason Dana and María Jiménez-Buedo. The authors include established as well as rising scholars in economics and philosophy, whose contributions span a wide range of topics and methods found in the experimental work of the two disciplines. Nadelhoffer, Heshmati, Kaplan and Nichols speak to a descriptive literature that suggests that, although people endorse consequentialist rationales for punishment, they largely punish out of retributive motives. Addressing a fundamental confound in that literature – seemingly retri- butive punishments that have the consequentialist benefit of communi- cating to the wrongdoer – they conducted three experiments in which subjects could punish a target by lowering the target’s payoffs without the target knowing about the punishment. They find that even absent any apparent consequentialist motives, people are often willing to inflict costly punishments on others. Brañas-Garza, Bucheli, Espinosa and García offer experimental data supporting the claim that in any particular instance people are systemat- ically motivated to act morally or immorally as a result of self-regulation 151 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267113000163 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.163.42.124, on 22 May 2020 at 11:09:51, subject to the Cambridge Core