Andrej Svorenčík

The Sidney Siegel Tradition: The Divergence of Behavioral and Experimental Economics at the End of the 1980s

Over two days in February 1988, several key experimental economists and cognitive psychologists met to explore the possibilities of joint research promoted by the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations under the rubric behavioral economics. The original vision that the meeting could open a line of inquiry on the growing body of behavioral “anomalies” and their robustness in a market setting proved naive. The divide between both camps was too big to bridge given the fundamentally different approaches to experimentation. The article traces how the work of Sidney Siegel, a psychologist briefly active in the 1950s, was recast by experimental economists as the basis of their experimental research, including the emphasis on performance-based payments of experimental subjects and avoiding deception. My reconstruction of this meeting and its aftermath sheds new light on the origin of the divergence of experimental and behavioral economics at the end of the 1980s.

MIT's Rise to Prominence: Outline of a Collective Biography

The core question of MIT Economics Department’s history – why has MIT economics risen to prominence so quickly – requires an approach to history of economics that focuses on the role of the networks within which economists operate, their ideas diffuse, and gain scientific credit. By reconstructing the network of MIT economics Ph.Ds. and their advisors, this paper furnishes not just evidence of how MIT rose to prominence as documented by the numerous ties of Nobel Laureates, Clark Medalists, elected officials of the AEA or the Council of Economic Advisors to the MIT network. The MIT Economics Department is also revealed as a community of self-replicating economists who are to a large extent trained by a few key advisers who were mostly trained at MIT as well. MIT exhibits a large share of graduates who remain in American academia that is disproportionate to the number of graduates it has produced. It is hypothesized that this has been an important factor in MIT’s rise to prominence. On a methodological level this paper introduces prosopography or collective biography, a well-established historiographic method, to the field of history of economics.

“Fraught with Controversy”: Organizing Expertise against Contingent Valuation

This paper examines consulting and expert work performed by (experimental) economists for the Exxon Valdez litigation case. One of the issues at stake was the use of a specific method, contingent valuation, to estimate the so-called passive use value part of the damage resulting from the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 24, 1989. Our interest is less in the possibilities of using contingent valuation to estimate passive use values as such, and more in the dynamics of consulting and expert work itself, which in litigation cases mostly remains hidden behind the veil of contracts. Because Exxon went explicitly public in the Exxon Valdez case, this veil can be partially lifted. In contrast with Public Trustees, who submitted a monetary damage estimate to the Court, Exxon decided to follow a radically different strategy: it organized an all-out assault on the method by which such a monetary estimate was most likely to be produced. That strategy cut across social and epistemic commitments of different segments of the economics discipline, raising questions about the different meanings of expertise, and the role of economists in the legal, business, and public domain. This paper aims to address these questions.

Knowledge and Skills

Good morning, everyone. Welcome back. Congratulations to us for assembling a complete group by more or less 8:30 in the morning after a late, but extremely, enjoyable dinner. One thought that crosses my mind is that I am going to try to encourage you where I can in the sessions today, as I was doing yesterday, but perhaps doing more so, to illustrate answers that you are giving me, points that you are making with reference to specific examples of your work, other people’s work, when these things were, and what happened. I want to encourage you to think in that reminiscence mode and provide examples that you are drawing on.

History and Future

Thank you. All right, as I said and there are two final things that I want to ask you guys. The first one is about disagreements. I think we have been a very jolly bunch and, I’m happy to say, nobody quarreling with one another much. But it seems to me there are some notable disagreements associated with experimental economics happening over the years and I can identify at least two different sorts of disagreements. Disagreements between experimental economists are fairly vocal, for example the debate about misbehavior in first price auctions would come to mind.

A Witness Seminar on the Emergency of Experimental Economics

On May 28 and 29, 2010, 11 experimental economists gathered at the premises of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) to participate in a so-called witness seminar on the history of the experiment in economics. The seminar was organized by Harro Maas and Andrej Svorencik, principal investigator and Ph.D. student on a grant project that was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) on the history of observational practices in economics.

The Growth of a Community

In the last session, we were talking very much about early days and the origins of experimental economics. I would like to wind the clock just a little bit further forward and think about what was happening in the late 1970s from then and into the ‘80s where it seems like various groups were emerging both in the U.S. and particularly in Europe and Germany and holding meetings to discuss experimental economics. Reinhard could you perhaps tell us first a bit about the German experimental society, how it came about, and the meetings that were associated with that.

The Very Beginnings

Good afternoon and welcome. For the record, let me say today is May 28, 2010. My name is Chris Starmer, and I am the moderator of this Witness Seminar on the Emergence and Evolution of Experimental Economics. The event is organized by Harro Maas and Andrej Svorencik, and funded by the Dutch Science Foundation. We are at the premises of the Royal Dutch Academy, and together with me are, from my right, participants Frans van Winden, John Ledyard, Jim Friedman, Charlie Holt, Vernon Smith, John Kagel, Betsy Hoffman, Reinhard Selten, Charlie Plott, Al Roth, and Stephen Rassenti. Welcome to all. During the event, my plan is, over a number of sessions, to explore with you four broad topics.