Keynote Speech: “Foundations of Experimental Economics, Economic Design and Applications”

Abstract

I want to begin with a couple of quotations. And in fact, here and there in the paper I will be using quotations from David Hume, Adam Smith or Hayek. This is not because I started as a classical economics scholar. It’s also not because I started with an interest in Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist. The special value of their contributions is what I discovered after having a long career in experimental economics. And in fact, without my experience as an experimentalist I don’t think there’s any way that I could have been able to appreciate the full significance of these quotations that I’m going to use. I now see them as enormously insightful in terms of what we have learned from experimental economics. What astonishes me is that Hayek and some of these 18th century scholars could have gotten to this level of understanding without doing experiments. I could not have done that.