Journal article: The first market experiments conducted by Vernon Smith [1962] have highlighted the importance of market institutions for the efficiency of exchanges. These institutions organize the flows of information between market participants and incentivize individual decisions. They have an impact on prices' dynamics, trading volume, allocative and informational efficiency of the market. Over the past thirty years, experimental economics became an empirical method used to design market in various industries. The laboratory is used as a testbed to study the properties and measure the performances of any institutions in a simple, controlled and replicable environment. In this paper, we illustrate this approach by reviewing the main researches conducted in the lab on the design of electricity markets.