Vernon L. Smith

An Experimental Study of Competitive Market Behavior

RECENT years have witnessed a growing interest in experimental games such as management decision-making games and games designed to simulate oligopolistic market phenomena. This article reports on a series of experimental games designed to study some of the hypotheses of neoclassical competitive market theory. Since the organized stock, bond, and commodity exchanges would seem to have the best chance of fulfilling the conditions of an operational theory of supply and demand, most of these experiments have

Bubbles, Crashes, and Endogenous Expectations in Experimental Spot Asset Markets

Spot asset trading is studied where the only external source of value is an independent draw from a common information dividend distribution at the end of each of fifteen trading periods. Fourteen of twenty-two experiments exhibit price bubbles. This tendency to bubble decreases with trader experience. The regression of changes in mean price on lagged excess bids (bids minus offers in the previous period) supports the hypothesis that the intercept is minus the one-period expected dividend value, and the slope is positive, where excess bids measures excess demand attributable to homegrown capital gains expectations. Copyright 1988 by The Econometric Society.

Experimental Economics: Induced Value Theory

It is the premise of this paper that the study of the decision behavior of suitably motivated individuals and groups in lab- oratory or other socially isolated settings such as hospitals (R. Battalio, J. Kagel, et al., 1973) has important and significant application to the development and verification of theories of the economic system at large.

A COMBINATORIAL AUCTION MECHANISM FOR AIRPORT TIME SLOT ALLOCATION

A sealed-bid combinatorial auction is developed for the allocation of airport time slots to competing airlines. This auction procedure permits airlines to submit various contingency bids for flight-compatible combinations of individual airport landing or take-off slots. An algorithm for solving the resulting set-packing problem yields an allocation of slots to packages that maximizes the system surplus as revealed by the set of package bids submitted. The algorithm determines individual (slot) resource prices which are used to price packages to the winning bidders at levels guaranteed to be no greater (and normally smaller) than the amounts bid. Laboratory experiments with cash motivated subjects are used to study the efficiency and demand revelation properties of the combinatorial auction in comparison with a proposed independent slot primary auction.

Positive reciprocity and intentions in trust games

Abstract Several recent theories in behavioral game theory seek to explain the behavior of subjects in experimental bargaining games. These models can be partitioned into two classes: outcome-based and intention-based. Outcome-based models treat the intentions that players attribute to one another as unnecessary for predicting behavior. Intention-based approaches, and in particular the trust and reciprocity (TR) hypothesis, rely on this attribution of intentions in an essential way. We report laboratory data from simple two-person trust games which is inconsistent with outcome-based models, but predicted by the trust and reciprocity hypothesis.

Rational Choice: The Contrast between Economics and Psychology

Rational Choice--the published record of a conference on economics and psychology--frames the issues as a contest between economic theory and the falsifying evidence from psychology. According to a third perspective, that of experimental economics, most standard theory provides a correct first approximation in predicting motivated behavior in laboratory experimental markets, but the theory is incomplete, particularly in articulating convergence processes in time and in ignoring decision cost. This view has roots in the work of Herbert Simon and Sidney Siegel, but it is not plainly represented in contemporary research in economic pyschology.

On Models of Commercial Fishing

1. A fishery resource, although conceivably exhaustible, is replenishable; that is, it is subject to laws of natural growth which define an environmental biotechnological constraint on the activities of the fishing industry. 2. The resource and the activity of production from it form a stock-flow relationship. The new growth in the population fish mass depends upon the harvest rate relative to natural recruitment to the stock. If the harvest rate exceeds the recruitment rate, the stock declines, and vice versa. 3. The recovery or harvesting process is subject to various possible external effects all of which represent external diseconomies to the firm: (a) Resource stock externalities result if the cost of a fishing vessels catch decreases as the population of fish increases. (b) Mesh externalities result if the mesh size (or other kinds of gear selectivity variables) affects not only the private costs and revenues of the fisherman but also the growth behavior of the fish population. (c) Crowding externalities occur if the fish population is sufficiently concentrated to cause vessel congestion over the fishing grounds and, thus, increased vessel operating costs for any given catch. All of these various types of externalities arise fundamentally because

Economics of Production from Natural Resources

This paper attempts to provide a unified theory of production from natural resources. A single model of an industry is used to describe a dynamic process of recovery from such technologically diverse resources as fish, timber, petroleum, and minerals. Recovery from each of these resources is seen as a special case of a general model, depending upon whether the resource is replenishable, and on whether production exhibits significant externalities. A model of centralized management, with particular reference to “common property” resources, such as fisheries, under stationary conditions, is also discussed and compared with competitive recovery in the stationary state.

On expectations and the monetary stakes in ultimatum games

In an ultimatum game, player 1 makes an offer of

Theory and individual behavior of first-price auctions

X from a total of