Although almost nonexistent until the 1980s, experiments in Finance have gained ever growing popularity in recent years. In 2021, the Journal of Banking and Finance launched a Special Issue “Experiments in Finance”. We introduce the field Experimental Finance and review the selected papers of the Special Issue. We conclude with implications and an outlook for experiments in finance (and experiments in general), particularly focusing on approaches for scientific robustness, open science, and meta-science.

Financial misbehavior is widespread and costly. The Dutch government legally requires every employee in the financial sector to take a Hippocratic oath, the so-called “banker’s oath.” We investigate whether nudges that (in)directly remind financial advisers of their oath affect their service. In a large-scale audit study, professional auditors confronted 201 Dutch financial advisers with a conflict of interest. We find that when auditors apply a nudge that directly refers to the banker’s oath, advisers are less likely to prioritize bank’s interests. In additional prediction tasks, we find that Dutch regulators expect stronger effects of the oath than observed.

Two aspects of social context are central to the finance industry. First, financial professionals usually make investment decisions on behalf of third parties. Second, social competition, in the form of performance rankings, is pervasive. Therefore, we investigate professionals’ risk taking behavior under social competition when investing for others. We run online and lab-in-the-field experiments with 805 financial professionals and show that professionals increase their risk taking for others when they lag behind. Additional survey evidence from 1349 respondents reveals that professionals’ preferences for high rankings are significantly stronger than those of the general population.