The first volume of my Papers in Experimental Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) included most of my research papers in experimentation up to 1990.This second volume includes papers published largely from 1990 to 1998 plus some earlier pieces that can be conveniently classified under the headings of bargaining or markets. Almost all the papers herein have been coauthored with others. Even more than is indicated in Papers in Experimental Economics, experimentation has become an effort requiring many bases to be covered, and the research is most efficaciously conducted by teams of coequal scholars who each bring special skills and expertise to the bench. Some of the themes in this collection are continuations of works included in the earlier volume, in particular market institutions and experimental methodology. This is because my coauthors and I have found them to be viable long-term research programs. Other themes, involving bargaining, psychology, and reciprocity sparked our interest in the mid- to late 1980s and began to appear in this decade in published papers.

I believe that experimental economics, as an important methodology of inquiry cutting across all fields in economics is here to stay, although there remain pockets of resistance to this development. Such resistance is welcome for it has helped to invigorate, challenge, and strengthen experimentation. For me, the methodology is of value in proportion to its capacity to help us understand human behavior broadly in economic societies. Hence, we see the importance of linking behavior in the laboratory to field data from the modern economy, as well as economic history, archeological, biological, and ethnographic data from prehistory.