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Reports on a project to create a new infrastructure for experimental economics and sociology by connecting cutting edge research to Web‐based software development. The project will build and maintain an active Web site of highly flexible modular architecture for theoretically‐driven experimentation. The Web site, itself a laboratory, fundamentally advances experimental study, automatically records and archives data, and maintains electronic journals. To increase the integrity and effectiveness of social science knowledge acquisition, the Web site will support replications while creating large and systematic databases. The Web‐lab’s goal is to change social science investigation by allowing experiments to be run using subjects from large and diverse populations. The Web‐lab will democratize experimental research; a local laboratory will need no more than a few computers with access to the Web. Using designs at the Web‐lab, extensive laboratory components will be developed for mainstream graduate and undergraduate social science courses.

Field experiments have raised important issues of interpretation of bargaining behavior. There is evidence that bargaining behavior appears to vary across groups of populations, such as nationality, ethnicity and sex. Differences have been observed with respect to initial behavior and with respect to the adjustment pattern over time. Often, such behavioral differences are referred to as cultural, although the delineation of the cultural group has been confined to one or other observable characteristic in isolation. We show that this way of characterizing cultural differences is overly simplistic: at best, it leads to unreliable claims; at worst, it leads to erroneous conclusions. We reconsider the evidence provided by previous experiments using ultimatum game rules, and undertake new experiments that expand the controls for demographics. The lesson from our demonstration is that the task of designing experiments for the field offers many challenges if one wants to define and control for cultural impacts, but that field experiments also offer potential for providing new insights into these issues.