Expecon Literature Positioning

Literature Positioning (expecon-literature-positioning)

When to trigger

• A referee or coauthor says "we already know this" — the marginal contribution over existing experiments is unclear
• Your design is close to a canonical paradigm (dictator, ultimatum, public goods, trust, beauty contest, double auction) and you must show what is genuinely new
• The intro cites behavioral theory but never says which prediction your treatment adjudicates
• You are unsure whether your novelty is a new treatment, a new method/elicitation, a replication, or a boundary condition

What counts as a contribution here

At a method-defined journal, positioning is not "no one has studied topic X." It is "no prior design could deliver the comparison I deliver." Locate your paper on this ladder, from weakest to strongest:

1. Re-label — same paradigm, new cover story. Usually insufficient on its own.
2. New boundary condition — a known effect tested where theory predicts it should vanish/flip; valuable when the prediction is sharp and pre-registered.
3. Confound removal — a cleaner control that isolates a mechanism prior designs conflated (e.g., separating altruism from confusion in public-goods contributions). Strong.
4. New decisive treatment — a contrast prior work could not run that adjudicates between competing behavioral models. Strongest.
5. Methodology of experimentation — evidence that a widely used procedure (strategy method, BDM, ELMS, double-blind payment, online vs. lab) biases results. A flagship-distinctive contribution.
6. Replication — direct or conceptual replication of a contested finding, ideally pre-registered and adequately powered. Explicitly in scope and valued.

Positioning the design against its ancestors

• Name the closest paradigm and the closest prior treatment explicitly, then state the one dimension you change and the prediction that change adjudicates. Vague "builds on a large literature" framing reads as not knowing the field.
• Map competing behavioral models to observable predictions. Inequity aversion, reciprocity, social-image, and confusion often predict the same mean contribution; your positioning must show your contrast splits them.
• Cite the methodological lineage, not just the topical one. An ExpEcon referee wants to see that you know why the standard procedure exists and where it has been criticized.
• Be honest about replication content. If your treatment is partly a replication of a prior result, say so and frame it as a strength (a powered re-test), not hide it.

Sibling boundary in the lit review

A reviewer should never finish the intro thinking "this is a JEBO behavioral paper" or "this is a GEB theory paper with a demo." Your literature should be dominated by experimental-methods work and read as a conversation about designs and procedures, not only about a phenomenon.

Worked vignette (illustrative)

A trust-game paper claims to be "the first to study trust under time pressure." A quick search shows several such studies — so the positioning collapses to a re-label. The fix climbs the ladder: the real contribution is confound removal — prior time-pressure designs confounded cognitive load with the deadline framing itself, and the new design adds a load-only control that holds framing fixed. Now the intro names the two closest prior treatments, states the single new control, and shows the contrast splits a "depletion of self-control" account (predicts less trust) from a "framing" account (predicts no change). The reference list leans on elicitation-method papers, not the broad trust literature.

Three sentences every ExpEcon intro needs

1. The closest design. "The closest prior experiment is [X], which [contrast]."
2. The one new thing. "We change exactly [one dimension], which prior designs could not isolate."
3. What it adjudicates. "This separates [model A] from [model B], which agree in [X] but diverge in [our treatment]."

If you cannot write these three sentences, the contribution is not yet positioned — return to expecon-topic-selection.