Abstract. Experimental economics is an increasingly important tool in accounting research. This paper examines how the accounting experimentalists' expertise in design, institutional knowledge, and theory can be used to enlighten policy debate. Two recent economics‐based experiments examining tax policy and audit education are used to highlight these ideas and show where careful attention to theory would shift the direction of research, making it more applicable to contemporary policy issues. Résumé. L'économique expérimentale est un instrument de plus en plus important en recherche comptable. L'auteure examine comment les aptitudes des expérimentateurs comptables en ce qui a trait à la définition des problématiques, leur connaissance des institutions et leur bagage théorique peuvent servir à éclairer le débat politique. Deux expériences récentes qui s'appuient sur l'économique portent sur la politique fiscale et la formation des vérificateurs et son employées pour jeter un nouvel éclairage sur ces idées et pour illustrer comment l'intérêt pour la théorie devrait modifier le cours de la recherche, en la rendant davantage applicable aux problèmes politiques contemporains.

In an experimental setting when outcomes are stochastically related to actions, predictions of equilibrium behavior depend not only on the participants' preference orderings of outcomes, but also on their orderings of lotteries on outcomes as well. We introduce and test a reward structure that can be utilized in any experimental setting to allow the experimenter to decree beforehand the subjects' preferences for lotteries on experimental outcomes. We show analytically that the proposed reward structure can induce subjects to behave as if they have the decreed preference function defined on experimental outcomes. Empirical tests using two different choice settings provide evidence to support this ability to control preferences.