11650: Experimenting: Best Practices and Future Directions

Interest in experimenting is fueled by an emphasis on establishing causality, which is desirable for publishing academic research in top journals. A recent methodological revolution in the social and behavioral sciences is not only changing the way in which scholars approach experimental design and data analysis, from pre-registering studies to making data and materials available on public repositories, but also raised new critical issues concerning methodological practices to achieve the rigor required in top journals. The purpose of this PDW is to elucidate best-practice recommendations and future directions for designing and conducting different types of experiments (i.e., online, laboratory, field, and quasi-experiments), with the goal of discussing current and future approaches for using experiments to advance theory across management fields including organizational behavior, leadership, human resources, entrepreneurship, organizational theory, and strategy. To this end, the PDW is designed to cover both methodological and statistical issues germane to conducting and publishing rigorous experiments that meet top journals’ requirements and address emerging research trends for directing future scholarship that bridges micro-, meso-, and macro-fields of management. This PDW will also include a Q&A session to encourage questions and reflections from all participants, and an interactive session with roundtables. This PDW was first held during the 2023 AoM Meeting in Boston and reorganized for the 2024 AoM Meeting in Chicago. In these two years, the PDW was highly successful, drawing more than 80 attendees and eliciting extremely positive feedback from participants. The PDW won the 2024 Best PDW Award from the RM division.

If you are interested in participating in the second part of the session (roundtables) to discuss questions specific to your experimental research, please register here by July 11, 2025, 11 pm EDT time: https://gwu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_79dkkSaVQNdLR7U You will be asked to answer a short questionnaire about your research interests and indicate some issues/questions related to experimental research methods that you have encountered in a project and that you want to discuss with the panelists.