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Reports on a project to create a new infrastructure for experimental economics and sociology by connecting cutting edge research to Web‐based software development. The project will build and maintain an active Web site of highly flexible modular architecture for theoretically‐driven experimentation. The Web site, itself a laboratory, fundamentally advances experimental study, automatically records and archives data, and maintains electronic journals. To increase the integrity and effectiveness of social science knowledge acquisition, the Web site will support replications while creating large and systematic databases. The Web‐lab’s goal is to change social science investigation by allowing experiments to be run using subjects from large and diverse populations. The Web‐lab will democratize experimental research; a local laboratory will need no more than a few computers with access to the Web. Using designs at the Web‐lab, extensive laboratory components will be developed for mainstream graduate and undergraduate social science courses.

This exposition explains how Elementary Theory works and how it has been developed over the last two-and-a-half decades. Both increased scope and heightened precision are covered.

Theoretic methodology is explained. Using that method formal models are constructed analogous to empirical events. Those models predict events, design experiments, and guide applications in the field.

There is a widely held belief in sociology that theory becomes more vague and imprecise as its scope broadens. Whereas broader generalizations are more vague than narrower ones, this exposition shows that abstract theory becomes more precise as its scope broadens.

Here implications and limitations are closely connected. Regarding implications, this exposition shows that scientific explanations and predictions are viable today in sociology but only when exact theory is employed. Regarding limitations, the theory and research included in this exposition make clear why the empiricist search for regularities that dominates sociological research is so very limited in its results.

This exposition demonstrates that theory is the method of all the sciences and in particular the science of sociology.