TY - GEN
T1 - Lab experiment and field experiment in the digital age
T2 - 39th International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2018
AU - Bapna, Ravi
AU - Burtch, Gordon
AU - Hong, Yili
AU - Sun, Tianshu
AU - Thatcher, Jason
N1 - Funding Information:
Gordon Burtch is an AssoiatecProfessor of Informtion &aDecision Sciences and McKnight Presidential Fellow at the University of Minnesota, in the Carlson School of Management. His work has been published in journals such as Management Science, Informtion SaystemResesarch, and MS QuaIrterly. He is a recipient of both the AIS Early Career Award and the INFORMS ISS Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award, as well as the INFORMS ISR and ISS best paper award. His research has been supported by Kauffmn Fouandation, the NET Institute, the 3M Foundation, Adobe and the US Department of Education.
Publisher Copyright:
© International Conference on Information Systems 2018, ICIS 2018.All rights reserved.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The emergence of digital platforms offered new venues for quasi-controlled experimentation, e.g., MTurk, or as hosts or collaborators for field experimentation, resulting in renewed interest in experimentation as a method for understanding causal relationships in the real-world, with delicate control and precision, at unprecedented scales. While digitization has significantly expanded the scope and scale of field experimentation, it also benefits laboratory experiment researchers, as it has extended understanding of the utility of experiments for understanding many different phenomena in online environments. With the rapid growth of digital capabilities to conduct both field experiments and lab experiments, it behooves us, as researchers and experimentalists to take a fresh look at both flavors of the method, and the interplay between them. In this digital age, are field experiments and lab experiments friends or foes? While the academic field of information systems (IS), which often has taken the intellectual leadership role in matters related to digital, we have largely lagged in our discussion of this important methodological issue. Despite the rapid evolution of the experiment landscape and the strong interest from the research communities in both lab and field experimentation, no systematic discussion has been conducted to arrive at clarity about the scope and future directions for IS research on this frontier, at our conferences or at our journals. Thus, in this panel, we open a discussion of how digital capabilities have enabled large-scale, randomized field experiments, how randomized field experiments may substitute or complement traditional laboratory experiments, and how these methods may be creatively combined and advance our understanding of the digital phenomenon in the future. Below we highlight several major issues, which we provide a detailed discussion.
AB - The emergence of digital platforms offered new venues for quasi-controlled experimentation, e.g., MTurk, or as hosts or collaborators for field experimentation, resulting in renewed interest in experimentation as a method for understanding causal relationships in the real-world, with delicate control and precision, at unprecedented scales. While digitization has significantly expanded the scope and scale of field experimentation, it also benefits laboratory experiment researchers, as it has extended understanding of the utility of experiments for understanding many different phenomena in online environments. With the rapid growth of digital capabilities to conduct both field experiments and lab experiments, it behooves us, as researchers and experimentalists to take a fresh look at both flavors of the method, and the interplay between them. In this digital age, are field experiments and lab experiments friends or foes? While the academic field of information systems (IS), which often has taken the intellectual leadership role in matters related to digital, we have largely lagged in our discussion of this important methodological issue. Despite the rapid evolution of the experiment landscape and the strong interest from the research communities in both lab and field experimentation, no systematic discussion has been conducted to arrive at clarity about the scope and future directions for IS research on this frontier, at our conferences or at our journals. Thus, in this panel, we open a discussion of how digital capabilities have enabled large-scale, randomized field experiments, how randomized field experiments may substitute or complement traditional laboratory experiments, and how these methods may be creatively combined and advance our understanding of the digital phenomenon in the future. Below we highlight several major issues, which we provide a detailed discussion.
KW - Digital experimentation
KW - Field experiment
KW - Lab experiment
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85062508979
T3 - International Conference on Information Systems 2018, ICIS 2018
BT - International Conference on Information Systems 2018, ICIS 2018
PB - Association for Information Systems
Y2 - 13 December 2018 through 16 December 2018
ER -