Numerous tributes to Elinor (Lin) Ostrom have appeared across a wide spectrum of academic and non-academic venues (e.g., see citations to tributes listed in the references). Certainly, Lin’s academic accomplishments are much too long and too broad for us to begin to adequately capture here. Needless to say, in addition to her path-breaking research, Lin’s career as an advocate for research examining issues of collective action included many honors, including becoming the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. In addition, Lin’s career included numerous elected offices, including serving as the president of the American Political Science Association, the Public Choice Society, and the International Association for the Study of the Commons. In this special issue of Experimental Economics, we wish to highlight two of Lin’s particular accomplishments, her choice to embrace experimental methods as central to the study of collective action and her leadership in creating the biennial conference on social dilemmas that became the impetus for this special issue.

In the 1981–1982 academic year, Vincent and Lin Ostrom were invited to participate in a year-long interdisciplinary program at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University in Germany on “Guidance, Control, and Performance Evaluation in the Public Sector.” Their time at Bielefeld provided them the opportunity to interact with leading scholars working in the areas of game theory and experimental methods. Already a pioneer in studying collective action and governance of the commons, at a stage in her career when many researchers are set in their intellectual outlooks, Lin began to plan a new research agenda, namely laboratory experiments for studying behavior in common-pool resource decision settings. The early experimental work on common-pool resources, much of which is synthesized in E. Ostrom et al. (Reference Ostrom, Gardner and Walker1994), helped to pave the way for an ever-broadening collection of experimental studies on behavior in common-pool resource settings, conducted by researchers from around the world. In her role as a pioneer in this area, Lin was the coauthor of more than twenty studies, including Cox et al. (Reference Cox, Ostrom, Sadiraj and Walker2013), Cárdenas et al. (Reference Cárdenas, Ahn, Ostrom and Huck2004), Janssen et al. (Reference Janssen, Holahan, Lee and Ostrom2010), Walker et al. (Reference Walker, Gardner, Herr and Ostrom2000), Ostrom et al. (Reference Ostrom, Walker and Gardner1992), Ostrom and Walker (Reference Ostrom, Walker and Palfrey1991), Walker et al. (Reference Walker, Gardner and Ostrom1990), and Gardner et al. (Reference Gardner, Ostrom and Walker1990). In many ways, the importance Lin placed on experimental research is summarized by the quote from her presidential address to the American Political Science Association:

In 2002, Lin was among a small group of scholars who organized the working group on Testing Theoretical Models of Individual Behavior in Dynamic Social Dilemmas, its first meeting held at Indiana University Bloomington in 2003. From that first meeting—which included 18 scholars drawn from economics, political science, and other disciplines—this group grew into an informal multidisciplinary network of scholars who held meetings in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2013 at four different sites (Max Planck Institute, Jena, Florida State University, Rice University, and California Institute of Technology), with 30–40 scholars attending the more recent meetings. Lin participated in each of the first four meetings, and was on the planning committee for the 2013 meeting at the time of her death in 2012. It was at the last meeting that the idea of producing special issues of the Journal of Theoretical Politics and Experimental Economics was planned in her honor. These two special issues are in each case coedited by core members of the working groups: Eric Coleman and Rick Wilson, Jimmy Walker and Mark Isaac, respectively.

It is an honor for us to have had the opportunity to participate in the creation of this special issue of Experimental Economics. We wish to thank the numerous referees who played a key role in bringing together this special issue and, of course, to David Cooper and Jacob Goeree without whom this issue could not have been created.Footnote ¹