Validity Test of Governance Institutions:a Literature Review Based on Experimental Economics

For a long time,testing the validity of governance institutions has been restricting the development of institutional economics.However,there is a new method to solve this prob-lems-- using mechanism design to test the validity of institutions.Through a review of relevant literature,we mainly focus on the role of voluntary contribution mechanism in comparing formal institutions and informal institutions.Relevant literature can be divided into two categories--static comparison of exogenous institutions and research on endogenous institutions.The former refers to testing the effectiveness of different institutions under controlled conditions and mainly concerns comparing people's contribution of different institutions,social welfare and so on.The latter extends the validity test,meaning that people can govern themselves by choosing various institutions and then the validity test can be done based on it.Using experimental methods reme-dies the inadequacy that the mainstream empirical research fails to test the validity of governance institutions and also provides a new approach to studying institutional economics.