Experimental economics for web mining

TL;DR

This paper proposes a framework to standardize experimental economics data for web mining, enabling open data publication and fostering new research questions about causality in web data analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a data format for experimental economics data and discusses how standardized datasets can enhance web mining and inspire new experiments.

Findings

Standardized experimental data can improve web data analysis.

Open datasets facilitate cross-study comparisons.

Web data analysis can inform new experimental designs.

Abstract

This paper offers a step towards research infrastructure, which makes data from experimental economics efficiently usable for analysis of web data. We believe that regularities of human behavior found in experimental data also emerge in real world web data. A format for data from experiments is suggested, which enables its publication as open data. Once standardized datasets of experiments are available on-line, web mining can take advantages from this data. Further, the questions about the order of causalities arisen from web data analysis can inspire new experiment setups.