Lab experiment and field experiment in the digital age: Friend or foe?

The emergence of digital platforms offered new venues for quasi-controlled experimentation, e.g., MTurk, or as hosts or collaborators for field experimentation, resulting in renewed interest in experimentation as a method for understanding causal relationships in the real-world, with delicate control and precision, at unprecedented scales. While digitization has significantly expanded the scope and scale of field experimentation, it also benefits laboratory experiment researchers, as it has extended understanding of the utility of experiments for understanding many different phenomena in online environments. With the rapid growth of digital capabilities to conduct both field experiments and lab experiments, it behooves us, as researchers and experimentalists to take a fresh look at both flavors of the method, and the interplay between them. In this digital age, are field experiments and lab experiments friends or foes? While the academic field of information systems (IS), which often has taken the intellectual leadership role in matters related to digital, we have largely lagged in our discussion of this important methodological issue. Despite the rapid evolution of the experiment landscape and the strong interest from the research communities in both lab and field experimentation, no systematic discussion has been conducted to arrive at clarity about the scope and future directions for IS research on this frontier, at our conferences or at our journals. Thus, in this panel, we open a discussion of how digital capabilities have enabled large-scale, randomized field experiments, how randomized field experiments may substitute or complement traditional laboratory experiments, and how these methods may be creatively combined and advance our understanding of the digital phenomenon in the future. Below we highlight several major issues, which we provide a detailed discussion.