Al Roth's
game theory, experimental economics, and market design page
I am the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and in the Harvard Business School.
My mailing addresses, phone numbers, and other contact info are here. (Here is my one paragraph HBS biography.)
My research is in game theory, experimental economics, and market design (for which game theory, experimentation, and computation are complementary tools).
My Fall 2006 course is Experimental Economics (Ec 2040/HBS 4160) (I was on leave in Fall 2007, the course will next be given in Spring 2009, when it should benefit from volume 2 of the Handbook of Experimental Economics.)
My Spring 2008 Market Design (Ec 2056/HBS 4150) course with Peter Coles (and its 2008 syllabus, and a page of Market Design Ideas for students (along with last year's (old) Market Design ideas). We also have an occasional seminar on matching and market design. updated 1/25/08
The Behavioral and Experimental Economics Workshop (Tuesday Seminar) (updated 2/14/07)
Job market candidates: Some of my students, postdocs, and research associates who are on the job market this year. (updated 3/29/08:
Antonia Atanassova
going to consulting,
Ben Greiner going to
UNSW in Sydney,
Fuhito Kojima going to
Stanford, stopping first at Yale ,
Robin Lee going to NYU Stern)
You can scroll through this page, or use the links in the table of contents. (Also, many of my papers and
books can be found in downloadable format in chronological order, rather than by topic (including my previously out of print
1979 book Axiomatic Models of Bargaining.)
Arthur Robson, and Karl Sigmund]
Game-theoretic models of bargaining. permission to webpublish
Two-sided matching models. permission to webpublish
Experimental economics (revised for 2003). permission to webpublish
Is Economics a Science? (Of course it is...) (two short letters to The Economist, one by me, one by Charlie Plott)
Matching and Allocation in Medicine and Health Care (transcript of a talk at the National Academy of Engineering)
For an account of my collaboration with Keith Murnighan, a social psychologist with whom I've written a dozen papers, see "Some of the Ancient History of Experimental Economics and Social Psychology: Reminiscences and Analysis of a Fruitful Collaboration,"
For some general exhortation regarding game theory as a part of empirical economics, see my article by that name in the Economic Journal: Game theory as a part of empirical economics.
For some thoughts on how game theory, experimental economics, and computation will form the toolbox for the design of markets and other economic environments, see Game Theory as a Tool for Market Design (in pdf format).
For some discussion of why the experimental evidence from individual choice experiments is interpreted differently by many psychologists and many economists, see Individual rationality as a useful approximation.
For an account of the history of experimental economics from 1930 to 1960, see Early History of Experimental Economics.
For some methodological exhortation (on how we conduct and report experiments) see "Let's Keep the Con Out of Experimental Econ.". (see also Conduct in Science)
For a discussion of the Nash equilibrium, see my short paper with Charlie Holt in PNAS, "The Nash Equilibrium: A Perspective"
Niederle, Muriel, Alvin E. Roth and Tayfun Sonmez, ''Matching and Market Design'', forthcoming in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan
Erev, Ido, and Alvin E. Roth, ''Multi-agent learning and the descriptive value of simple models,'' Artificial Intelligence, 171, 2007, 423-428.
All of a sudden people are putting lectures on the web: here are some overlapping overviews of market design I recently gave:
Rosenthal Memorial Lecture at Boston University: What have we learned from market design? April 27, 2007. (about an hour and a half, covers kidney exchange, and school choice in New York and Boston, see if you can find the photo that seems to be of Bart Lipman when I talk about repugnance of some transactions).
Market failures and Market Design, Google, October 11, 2007. (about an hour, covers the labor market designs for gastroenterologists, orthopaedic surgeons, and others, and kidney exchange.)
Yahoo! Big Thinker Series: Market Design: October 15, 2007. (about an hour, covers kidney exchange and school choice, and repugnant transactions.)
Here's a radio interview I did about game theory on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, New York Public Radio, 10/11/2005 (on the occasion of the Aumann/Schelling Nobel Prize): Listen ; Download MP3
You can listen to a 90-second show about kidney exchange (from 2005) on the NSF-sponsored radio broadcast Imagine That.
My paper on Repugnant Markets formed the basis for a BBC Radio 4 broadcast in July 2007: here's the half-hour long recording .
Here's a radio interview about market design, 11/14/07, from public radio station WOSU in Columbus Ohio (about 1 hour).
Robin Young of NPR's Here and Now interviewed me about repugnant markets on March 25, 2008 in a piece called The "Yuck!" Factor (15 minutes)
Economic institutions evolve, but they are also designed. Market makers and regulators, as well as entrepreneurs and managers, have always been involved to some extent in the design of economic institutions.
Game theory is the part of economics concerned with the detailed rules and procedures of economic institutions. But only relatively recently have the depth and breadth of robust game theoretic knowledge been sufficient so that game theorists can with some confidence offer practical advice on institutional design.
As robust knowledge accumulates, game theorists are increasingly able to offer advice on the design of economic institutions in environments which may still be too complex to prove theorems about. That is, the process of giving advice is not the same as looking in Econometrica for the right theorem, but neither is it entirely unrelated. This is natural: just as chemical engineering is related to but different from chemistry, we can expect "microeconomic engineering" and economic design to be different from but related to game theory. (The final paragraph of my 1991 essay Game theory as a part of empirical economics, reads as follows.)
"... in the long term, the real test of our success will be not merely how well we understand the general principles that govern economic interactions, but how well we can bring this knowledge to bear on practical questions of microeconomic engineering, to design appropriate mechanisms for price formation (as in different kinds of auction), dispute resolution, executive compensation, market organization, etc. To do this we'll need to learn more about the various kinds of frictions that enter economic environments as a function of size and complexity, about which properties of these environments are robust and which are fragile, and about which kinds of environments facilitate which kinds of learning. Just as chemical engineers are called upon not merely to understand the principles that govern chemical plants, but to design them, and just as physicians aim not merely to understand the biological causes of disease, but their treatment and prevention, a measure of the success of microeconomics will be the extent to which it becomes the source of practical advice, solidly grounded in well tested theory, on designing the institutions through which we interact with one another."
It has been gratifying, in the years since I wrote that, to see market design begin to emerge as one of the subdisciplines of economics. As game theorists are increasingly asked to answer design questions, we need to pay attention to good examples of economic design, to start building a sensible, practice oriented literature. This page is meant to take a step in that direction, by pointing out some recent examples.
In the years since my 1991 essay I have gotten to design (or redesign, or advise on the design) of a number of market and quasi-market allocation systems, from the National Resident Matching Program (that puts American doctors into their first jobs, to school choice systems now operating in New York City and Boston, to the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, to the market for Gastroenterology Fellows, and the market for new Ph.D. economists. In the course of this, my colleagues and I have learned a lot about design, and also about the variety of market failures that create the need for new markets to be designed.
A lot of market design has turned out to involve game theoretic models of matching. Here's a link to a good book on the subject:
I've now written several
A lot of market design has involved deferred acceptance algorithms, that build on the famous 1962 paper by Gale and Shapley that introduced the marriage and college admissions problems and stable matching generally. Here's a survey I prepared in honor of David Gale's 85th birthday:
Below is my 2007 Hahn Lecture at the Royal Economic Society :
For a more specialized survey (listed below under Gastroenterology) see my paper with Muriel Niederle, ''The Effects of a Central Clearinghouse on Job placement, Wages, and Hiring Practice'', in Labor Market Intermediation, David Autor, Editor, NBER, forthcoming.
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I started studying the labor market for American doctors in the early 1980's, and was asked to direct its redesign in 1995.
The Roth-Peranson (1999) algorithm that resulted is now used to organize a number of medical and (mostly) health care
markets. The following are organized through or with the support of Elliott Peranson's company
National Matching Services:
Postdoctoral Dental Residencies
in the United States,
Psychology
Internships in the United States and Canada,
Neuropsychology Residencies
in the United States and Canada,
Osteopathic Internships in the United States,
Pharmacy Practice Residencies in the United States,
Articling Positions with Law Firms in
Alberta, Canada, Medical Residencies in the United States (NRMP), Medical Residencies in Canada (CaRMS).
An anti-trust suit against the NRMP and numerous other defendants was brought in 2002 by 16 law firms on behalf of 3 former residents seeking to represent the class of all former residents (and naming as defendants a class including all hospitals that employ residents). It was dismissed on August 12, 2004 in an Opinion, Order & Judgment by Judge Paul L. Friedman. Here is the original lawsuit (later amended in various ways in different filings) and Orley Ashenfelter's expert report for the plaintiffs. Here is the defendants' website. The theory of the complaint is that a match holds down wages for residents and fellows. Jeremy Bulow and Jon Levin have a paper in the June 2006 AER Matching and Price Competition providing some logical support for this possibility, by comparing impersonal prices to perfectly competitive prices at which each worker is paid his marginal product. Vince Crawford has a followup paper forthcoming in JEBO, The Flexible-Salary Match: A Proposal to Increase the Salary Flexibility of the National Resident Matching Program observing that personalized prices can be incorporated in a match. Muriel Niederle's and my JAMA paper "Relationship Between Wages and Presence of a Match in Medical Fellowships," showed that in fact there is no difference in wages between medicine subspecialties that use a match and those that don't, and our work (see below) on the collapse of the gastroenterology match showed that, following that collapse, wages did not rise (and many adverse consequences for applicants transpired). Muriel Neiderle has a December 2007AER paper more carefully modeling the form that ordered contracts take in the NRMP, which shows that competitive equilibrium is not hindered. Fuhito Kojima has a June 2007 AER paper showing that impersonal prices may not compress wages as in Bulow and Levin when firms can hire more than one worker.. Congress passed legislation clarifying that the NRMP is a marketplace and does not violate antitrust laws. (This was attached to a larger bill, the Pension Funding Equity Act of 2004 Public Law 108-218; the relevant section is quite short and easy to read, it is SEC. 207. CONFIRMATION OF ANTITRUST STATUS OF GRADUATE MEDICAL RESIDENT MATCHING PROGRAMS. This legislation led directly to the dismissal of the case. (In June 2006 the appellate court upheld the dismissal, and on January 8, the Supreme Court denied plaintiffs' petition to hear an appeal of the dismissal.).
Muriel Niederle and I have examined the failure of the Gastroenterology Fellowship market in the late 1990's, it's consequences, and what would be needed to get it back on its feet. (This helped us learn a lot about what clearinghouses accomplish.) We helped organize the centralized match that is now scheduled to be run in June 2006, and the policies that govern the transition to the match.
Here's the resolution about the conduct of the match passed in 2006 by the four main Gastroenterology professional societies.
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After Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver and I wrote our first paper on kidney exchange (inspired by the pioneering surgeons who did the first handful of these, in Maryland, New England, and Ohio), we contacted Drs. Frank Delmonico and Susan Saidman of the Massachusetts General Hospital. With them we helped found the New England Program for Kidney Exchange (NEPKE) in 2005. We have also been running matches for Drs. Steve Woodle and Michael Rees and their colleagues in the Paired Donation Consortium they started in Ohio, and more recently for the Alliance for Paired Donation. There is now a movement towards a national exchange...
Roth, Alvin E., Tayfun Sonmez and M. Utku Unver, ''Kidney Paired Donation With Compatible Pairs,'' American Journal of Transplantation, (letter to the editor) 2007, 7:1.
There have been several news stories about the work on implementing kidney exchange in New England that Sonmez and Unver and I are doing with local surgeons and tissue typing experts, especially Frank Delmonico and Susan Saidman. The Boston Globe ran a front page story called Cross-donor system planned for region's kidney patients, June 5, 2004, and The Wall Street Journal ran a story on page B1 titled "Easing the Kidney Shortage,," June 17, 2004. The SIAM News ran a slightly more technical story. The National Science Foundation has a story highlighting the basic research underlying the organization of kidney exchange, Kidney Exchange: A Life-Saving Application of Matching Theory. You can listen to a 90-second show about kidney exchange (from 2005)on the NSF-sponsored radio broadcast Imagine That. The organization we helped found is the New England Program for Kidney Exchange (NEPKE).The Boston Globe ran a story called Giving Life Despite Limits on 3/14/06 emphasizing the aspect of matching strangers. Dubner and Levitt have a column on kidney transplants in the 7/9/2006 NY Times Sunday Magazine, and some related links on their Freakonomics page. Quite apart from the complexities of matching, there are moving human stories behind each exchange. Here is a story with a photo of the six participants (3 donors, 3 recipients) in an undirected (altruistic) donor chain matched through NEPKE, when they all met in March 2007, a month after their successful, simultaneous surgeries. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran a pair of stories in May 2007 focusing on the software being developed to implement kidney exchange by Tuomas Sandholm (and here is a more detailed story about Sandholm's work, in a CMU magazine), which now replaces the earlier software written by Utku Unver in the matches run for the Alliance for Paired Donation. The AMA ran a story in their Jan.28, 2008 issue of amednews.com on kidney markets, repugnance, and kidney exchange. Tim Harford (the Undercover Economist) has a story on the 6-way exchange run at Hopkins in April 2008, following up his related article in the Financial Times, "Stakes in kidneys."
Because the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984 prohibits ''any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation..." questions have sometimes arisen about the legal status of kidney exchange, and of the possible future ability of UNOS or some other organization created in part by the NOTA to organize it. UNOS published a legal opinion that kidney exchange is legal under the NOTA as written, and legislation to amend the NOTA to make this explicit was introduced in the House and Senate in January and February of 2007, and became the `Charlie W. Norwood Living Organ Donation Act' [Public Law 110-144] in December, 2007. (In late March 2007--better late than never-- the U.S. Department of Justice finally issued a memo saying that in fact kidney exchange is legal under the NOTA.) The Norwood Act makes clear that "human organ paired donation" includes not just 2-way exchanges, but larger ones as well (the "paired" in "paired donation" here is interpreted as referring to the patient-donor pairs, and avoids the need to use the word "exchange").
Following the recent changes in the legal landscape, a national kidney exchange clearinghouse is being considered by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the non-profit agency that already administers the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) for deceased donors. On February 4, 2008, they hosted a meeting to hear proposals on how such a clearinghouse might be organized (here is the agenda, and here are the slides that Utku Unver and I discussed in the first presentation, and a follow-up summary memorandum).
Here are two photos of a kidney exchange I observed in January 2006 (I am the one in the yellow gown, keeping my hands behind my back...) kidney prep, transplant.
New England Program for Kidney Exchange(NEPKE)
Nepke's description and bibliography of kidney exchange
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In May 2003 the Director of Strategic Planning at the New York City Dept. of Education contacted me for advice on designing a centralized high school admission process for the 90,000+ students who enter 9th grade in NYC each year. Parag Pathak and I undertook the task, and quickly started talking to Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Tayfun Sonmez, who had written a paper on school matching that appeared in the June 2003 AER. In September 2003 the Boston Globe carried a story on that paper, mentioning the resident matching program as a possible alternative design, that led to us all meeting with Boston Public Schools in October 2003 about redesigning the Boston school choice system. More recently, Neil Dorosin (who used to work at NYCDOE) has founded the non-profit Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC) to promote modern school choice technology.
Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "The New York City High School Match," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 95,2, May, 2005, 364-367.
Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match,'' revised, April, 2008.
The new school choice mechanisms went into operation in New York City in 2003 (for students entering high school in 2004), and in Boston in 2006 (for 2007 entry into grades K, 6, and 9). In April, 2006 Harvard hosted a conference on Designing Choice, for schools officials and others interested in choice from around the country.
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The paper on repugnant markets has been popular in the blogosphere and the press, e.g. here, and here, and here, and (earlier) here...even though I refrained from calling it "Ick-onomics"). It also formed the basis for a BBC Radio 4 broadcast on Repugnant Markets in July, 2007. Here's the transcript, (in which I seem to say "you know" a lot) and here's the half-hour long audio recording (in which you can judge for yourself), and some related BBC news stories here and here. And here's a related story in the Financial Times on kidney exchange by Tim Harford, who conducted the BBC interviews (and who also thinks about buying babies). Here's an interview on repugnance at HBS Working knowledge (their story includes a video of the North American Wife Carrying Championships). Here's a WSJ online discussion between Julio Elias and me of markets for kidneys, repugnance, and how kidney exchange seems not to arouse repugnance. The AMA ran a story in their Jan.28, 2008 issue of amednews.com on kidney markets, repugnance, and kidney exchange. Here's an April '08 Freakonomics blog connecting the discussion to the market for kidneys in Iran. There was an American Enterprise Institute symposium on Repugnance as a constraint on markets (with video and audio links) on 1/16/08 in Washington DC, the commentators were an interesting and diverse group: Sally Satel, Paul Bloom, and Michael Novak. It was followed by a Jan 31 NY Times article: Economists Dissect the 'Yuck' Factor. That article in turn was followed by this Freakonomics column: Repugnance Revisited, or: Are Economists Really 'Evil'? (I guess it's a tossup: evil or dismal?) Robin Young of NPR's Here and Now interviewed me about repugnant markets on March 25, 2008 in a piece called The "Yuck!" Factor (15 minutes)
The WSJ Law Blog ran an item on this paper that drew some interesting comments, as did the followups here and here (where they touch on issues Muriel Niederle and I discuss about Designing Rules for Offers and Acceptances.
I am the chair of the American Economic Association's Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, whose other members are John Cawley, Philip Levine, Muriel Niederle, and John Siegfried. We have been charged with making recommendations to improve the efficiency of the market for new economists.
The first of our recommendations to be put into practice, in the Spring of 2006, is the Economics Job Scramble, a web page on which applicants and employers could indicate their continued availability as of late March. The second, which went online November 20, 2006, is that the AEA will facilitate Signaling for Interviews in the Economics Job Market, to allow applicants to send up to two signals to employers with whom they would like to interview. Here is some description and advice.(See also Greg Mankiw's blog on the subject, and the January 8, 2007 Wall Street Journal story "Economists Learn Matchmaker Role" that was reprinted in various non-subscription-required places under the heading Job Hunting Takes a Line From Dating.).
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There's a growing body of work about online reputation mechanisms. See e.g. Chris Dellarocas, Axel Ockenfels, Paul Resnick, and the Reputations Research Network.
Some illuminating attention has recently been paid to search-engine ad auctions: see the papers by Edelman, Ostrovsky, and Schwarz, and by Hal Varian.
Here's Amy Greenwald's essay Game Theory and the Design of Electronic Markets.
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Researchers in matching and market design: (game theorists, experimenters and computer scientists interested in matching, auctions and market design) Alphabetically by last name:
Atila Abdulkadiroglu | David Abraham | Jose Alcalde | Ahmet Alkan | Susan Athey (Clark Medal winner, 2007) | Larry Ausubel | Chris Avery | Ken Binmore | Anna Bogomolnaia | Eric Budish | Jeremy Bulow | Estelle Cantillon | Kim-Sau Chung | Peter Coles| Vincent Conitzer | Peter Cramton | Vincent Crawford | Chris Dellarocas | Faye Diamantoudi | Ettore Damiano | Ben Edelman | Lars Ehlers | Federico Echenique | Aytek Erdil | Haluk Ergin | Itay Fainmesser | Guillaume Frechette | Li Gan | Ernan Haruvy | John Hatfield | Nicole Immorlica | Rob Irving | Onur Kesten | Bettina Klaus | Paul Klemperer | Flip Klijn | Fuhito Kojima | Hideo Konishi | John Ledyard | Robin Lee | Jon Levin | Li, Hao | Mohamad Mahdian | Mihai Manea | Jordi Masso | David Manlove | R. Preston McAfee | John McMillan | Paul Milgrom | Eiichi Miyagawa | Benny Moldovanu | Herve Moulin | Muriel Niederle | Noam Nisan | Axel Ockenfels | Michael Ostrovsky | Szilvia Papai | David Parkes | Parag Pathak | David Perez-Castrillo | Charlie Plott | Marek Pycia | Paul Resnick | Antonio Romero-Medina | Amir Ronen | Tuomas Sandholm| Michael Schwarz | Jay Sethuraman | Yoav Shoham| Tayfun Sonmez | Marilda Sotomayor | Wing Suen | Utku Unver | Hal Varian | Rakesh Vohra | Robert Wilson | Licun Xue |
The computational game theory group at Microsoft Research has posted some papers on design.
The 2007 Nobel Prize for "foundations of mechanism design theory" was awarded to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson. Here are the very short, short, and longer announcements from the Nobel committee, and the video. While much of mechanism design theory is fairly abstract, it's easy to see how market designers can think of ourselves as doing "applied mechanism design," particularly when we think about fundamental concepts like incentive compatibility.
In 1993, Congress authorized the Federal Communications Commission to auction off licenses for radio spectrum (which had previously been allocated by bureaucratic means.) This was the birth of auction design as a big activity for economists, as many auction theorists and others got involved. The FCC maintains a lot of information on these auctions on their Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Auctions Home Page, including some background information. Other countries followed suit, making auction design an international activity. Here is the UK's Radiocommunication Agency's spectrum auction page.
Many of the most prominent auction designers involved in spectrum and electricity auctions formed the firm Market Design Inc, which has a long and varied collection of auction markets they have designed or advised and a bibliography of papers (mostly from the 1990's).
Economic Principals has a nice article about Paul Milgrom and his book Putting Auction Theory to Work, in the context of designing spectrum auctions.
Peter Cramton, Yoav Shoham and Richard Steinberg have edited a volume on Combinatorial Auctions.
You can download Paul Klemperer's book Auctions: Theory and Practice from his home page.
Vijay Krishna has a textbook called Auction Theory.
Scottish doctors needed to be scheduled as well as matched, and The Scottish PRHO Allocations Scheme describes a recently implemented algorithm for doing so, designed by Rob Irving at the University of Glasgow. (Earlier incarnations of this and other British markets are discussed in Roth, A.E. "A Natural Experiment in the Organization of Entry Level Labor Markets: Regional Markets for New Physicians and Surgeons in the U.K.," American Economic Review, vol. 81, June 1991, 415-440. Irving and David Manlove have a page on their work on Stable Matching Algorithms.
Michael Kremer has been doing on a lot of work on the design of markets for vaccines.
Susan Athey teaches an undergrad class on market design at Harvard: here is her syllabus.
Peter Cramton teaches a market design class at Maryland.
Francoise Forges coordinates a program on Du calcul economique a l' economic design at Universite Paris-Dauphine
Kate Larson has a course on Electronic Market Design at Waterloo.
Noam Nisan teaches a class called Foundations of Electronic Commerce.
David Parkes has a class on Computational Mechanism Design
Tuomas Sandholm teaches Foundations of Electronic Marketplaces at CMU
Leigh Tesfatsion maintains pages on Electricity restructuring and market design.
Utku Unver teaches Matching Market Design at Pitt.
Bob Wilson has posted some of his class materials from his market design class at Stanford.
(And here's another link to my market design class at Harvard.)
Thomas Kittsteiner and
Axel Ockenfels have a
review paper:
Market Design: A Selective Review. Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft,
Special Issue 5 (2006), 121-143.
Software:
Greg Barron has put online the Excel implementation of the (Gale-Shapley) Deferred Acceptance Algorithm he built for the IMF's Economist Program.
Conferences:
Workshop on Matching: Theory, Applications, and Experiments, Barcelona, June 8-9, 2007 (conference is over, but useful links to papers are still up on the program page).
MATCH-UP: Matching Under Preferences– Algorithms and Complexity Satellite workshop of ICALP 2008 6 July 2008 Reykjavik, Iceland
A matching conference recently held at Cal Tech (Feb 29-March 2 2008) has links to many interesting papers.
The Society for Social Choice and Welfare will meet in Montreal June 19-22, 2008, and Tayfun Sonmez will receive the Social Choice and Welfare Prize
The Society for Economic Design's
SED 2008 5th
Conference on Economic Design, June 15-17, Ann Arbor, with plenary
talks by Susan Athey and Faruk Gul.
Here are two papers on the early history of experimental economics (and its close relation to game theory):
Roth, A.E., "On the Early History of Experimental Economics," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 15, Fall 1993, 184-209.
Francesco Guala's brief History of Experimental Economics.
John H. Kagel and Alvin E. Roth, editors, Princeton University Press, 1995. Paperback edition, Fall 1997. Table of Contents (click on chapter headings for detailed contents) 1. Introduction to Experimental Economics by Alvin E. Roth 2. Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research by John O. Ledyard 3. Coordination Problems by Jack Ochs 4. Bargaining Experiments by Alvin E. Roth Bibliography of bargaining experiments. 5. Industrial Organization: A Survey of Laboratory Research by Charles A. Holt 6. Experimental Asset Markets: A Survey by Shyam Sunder 7. Auctions: A Survey of Experimental Research by John H. Kagel 8. Individual Decision Making by Colin Camerer Reviews (from the hardcover bookjacket) by Ken Binmore, Robert Gibbons, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, and Ariel Rubinstein, and (from the paperback bookjacket) by Katerina Sherstyuk and F. van Winden. Kenneth C. Williams of Michigan State University wrote the following review in the American Political Science Review, Sept. 1996, Volume 90, pp632-633. Permission to web publish Ordering information from PUP for U.S. and overseas customers.
The Handbook of Experimental Economics,
Volume 2
Announcing the Handbook of Experimental Economics Vol 2. to be published by Princeton University Press; J. Kagel and A. Roth (eds). We are pleased to announce the plans for volume 2 of the Handbook of Experimental Economics. The idea is to cover topics that have seen substantial growth since (or were not covered in) the publication of vol 1 as well as to update several of the more active subject areas. As with vol 1 the emphasis will be on series of experiments showing the back and forth that whittles down what we do not know. The list of contributors and authors is listed below (with links to chapters as they become ready for public review and comment). 1. Intro: the last ten+ years (Roth) 2. IO (Charlie Holt +Tim Cason) 3. Political economy (Palfrey) 4. Public Goods (Andreoni and Vesterlund) 5. Different Groups: Gender/discrimination, cross cultural, (Muriel Niederle) 6. Learning and the Economics of Small Decisions, by Ido Erev and Ernan Haruvy 7. Field Experiments: "Psychology and Economics in the Field" (Sendhil Mullainathan & ?) 8. Neuroeconomics (David Laibson, Harvard, Colin Camerer (Cal Tech), Jon Cohen (Princeton), Ernst Fehr (Zurich), Paul Glimcher (NYU), George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon), Read Montague (Baylor)) 9. Other-regarding preferences (Cooper and Kagel) 10. Auctions (Levin and Kagel) 11. Macroeconomics: A Survey of Laboratory Research, by John Duffy 12. Market Design (Roth) Penultimate versions of the chapter contributions will be presented on July 14-16, 2007 at the Stony Brook Game Theory festival. We invite interested members of the research community to attend the Game Theory festival which will include many more sessions than just this one (see the Stony Brook web site for topics to be covered). We also invite members of the research community to send suggestions to the authors of the relevant chapters. |
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The Scottish Experimental Economics Laboratory at the University of Aberdeen (where you can find Jurgen Bracht, Miguel Costa-Gomes, Nick Feltovich, Erika Seki, and Joe Swierzbinski.)
The UAA Experimental Economics Laboratory at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision-Making at the University of Amsterdam.
Juan Camilo Cardenas at Universidad de los Andes.
Todd Cherry, David Dickenson, and Tanga M. McDaniel at Appalachian State University.
Economic Science Lab at the University of Arizona., directed by Martin Dufwenberg
David Reiley is at the University of Arizona and Yahoo! (He notes: "I am the economist formerly known as David Lucking-Reiley.")
A list of Australian experimenters is on the web site of the ARC Economic Design Network
Ananish Chaudhuri at the University of Auckland, NZ
Laboratory of Experimental Economics at the University of Bonn, founded by Reinhard Selten, directed by Armin Falk.
A stellar group of diverse experimenters at the University of California, Berkeley, runs the experimental social science lab called XLab
The Laboratory for Experimental Economics and Political Science at Cal Tech is directed by Charlie Plott. Tom Palfrey and David Levine (at UCLA) direct the California Social Science Experimental Laboratory at UCLA. John Ledyard has a number of his experimental papers up on his page, including several addressed towards questions of market design.
Gary Charness at the University of California, Santa Barbara has links to quite a few of his papers.
Dan Friedman and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have some pages on Learning and Experimental Economics.
Jim Andreoni, Vince Crawford and Uri Gneezy are at the University of California, San Diego.
David Cooper and Bob Slonimare at Case Western Reserve University.
Glenn Harrison is at the University of Central Florida
Andreas Ortmann is at Charles University.
Axel Ockenfels is at the University of Cologne.
Dick Thaler and George Wu are at the University of Chicago's School of Business. John List has recently moved to Chicago's economics department, from the University of Maryland, where his Field Experiments site still resides.
There is an active program in experimental economics at the University of East Anglia, including two of the field's pioneers, Graham Loomes and Robert Sugden.
Oliver Kirchcamp is at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena.
Georgia State University's Experimental Economics Center is growing.
Here at Harvard there are experimenters (both in the lab and field) all over: when I get organized I'll link to some more of their web pages: Nava Ashraf, Greg Barron, Ben Greiner, David Laibson, Sendhil Mullainathan, ... David Laibson has written a letter to incoming Harvard graduate students listing Harvard faculty with behavioral/experimental interests.
Hewlitt Packard has a Game theory and experimental economics research group
The Center for Experimental Business Research at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has an elaborate site with many links. See also the personal page of the lab's director, Rami Zwick
On Sunday, 25 June 1995, I had the privilege of participating in the inauguration of the new experimental lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem--RatioLab. The directors are Professors Gary Bornstein, Eyal Winter, and Shmuel Zamir.
Jordi Brandtsis at the Institute for Economic Analysis in Barcelona.
Bob Forsythe is one of the founders of the very active experimental group at the University of Iowa.
Georg Weizsäcker is at the London School of Economics.
The experimental lab at the University of Mannheim was the host to the ESA conference in June '98.
Werner Guth directs the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena.
Jim Engle-Warnick is at McGill, in Montreal, where there is an active inter-University lab called Cirano.
Experimental Economics Laboratory at McMaster University is directed by Stuart Mestelman and Andrew Muller.
The Mississippi Experimental Research Laboratory is at 'Ole Miss' directed by Mark Van Boening.
Dan Ariely at MIT has some really novel experiments.
Experimental Economics Research Program at the University of New Mexico: Philip Ganderton, David Brookshire, Stuart Burness.
Andy Schotter and Guillaume Frechette are at NYU.
The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics at U. Nottingham is directed by Chris Starmer. Robin Cubitt, Simon GŠchter and Martin Sefton are among the experimenters there.
John Kagel and Dan Levin and Lixin Ye are part of the active program of Experimental Economics Ohio State University.
Tatsuyoshi Saijo at Osaka University makes some of his papers available, in English and Japanese.
At Penn State, the active laboratory for economic management and auctionsis the home of Gary Bolton, Elena Katok, Anthony Kwasnica, and Abdullah Yavas.
Andreas Blume, John Duffy, Jack Ochs, and Lise Vesterlund contribute to making Pittsburgh a center of experimental economics.
The page for the Laboratori d'Economia EXperimental at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona introduces some of their faculty and ongoing work; see Rosemarie Nagel's page there. Carmit Segal has just joined them too.
Tim Cason and is keeping the experimental tradition alive at Purdue.
Alistair Munro and Dirk Engelmann are at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The University of Siena has an Experimental Economics Laboratory
Muriel Niederle is at Stanford.
Pablo Guillen finished two years as a Faculty Fellow at the CLER Lab at Harvard, and is moving to the University of Sydney.
Ido Erev is at the Technion in Haifa.
John Van Huyck and Brit Grosskopf are among the experimenters at Texas A&M University.
Catherine Eckel and Ernan Haruvy are experimenters at the University of Texas at Dallas
CentER at Tilburg University has an experimental facility called Centerlab. Jan Potters has some of his experimental papers up on the web.
The Computable and Experimental economics lab at the University of Trento has a page describing their activities.
The Laboratorio de Investigación en Economía Experimental is a joint project of two universities in Valencia.
Charlie Holt at the University of Virginia is a leading experimenter, and his web site has material both on his experimental research, and on his uses of experiments in teaching economics.
Douglas Davis and Laura Razzolini are experimenters at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Ananish Chaudhuri at Washington State University has a page for his work and his class on Behavioral Economics.
Jim Andreoni at the University of Wisconsin has some of his papers and (soon to come) data up on the web. (Check out some of his academic children.)
Owen Phillips and Jason Shogren are at the University of Wyoming.
The Centre for Experimental Economics at the University of York. is directed by Miguel Costa-Gomes. John Hey founded the lab there.
Ernst Fehr and Bruno Frey and Urs Fischbacher have web pages representing the active research program at the University of Zurich.
For names and addresses of experimental economists, a good source is the directory maintained by the Economic Science Association. The endearingly named European Network for the Development of Experimental Economics and its Application to Research on Institutions and Individual Decision Making has contact information for many European experimenters, as does the Gesellschaft für Experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung (Society for Research in Experimental Economics), including a big list of European labs, and a survey (in English) of experimental software and advice by Oliver Kirchcamp.. A group of like-minded psychologists is the Society for Judgment and Decision Making
A page on The Economic Behavior of Children by Bill Harbaugh and Kate Krause contains some experiments involving children, and a bibliography.
A page on Experiments on families is maintained by Alistair Munro.
There is growing interest in experimental methods among researchers in Operations Management.
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The Technion Prediction Tournament is open, for simple models that will predict choice of a riskless alternative versus a simple lottery, under one of three conditions (1. Description; 2. Experience sampling; 3. Experience repeated.) See the related Call for Papers for a special issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making on "Experience-Based Decision Making." The winners will be invited to be co-authors of a paper that summarizes the results (and will be submitted to the special issue of J of Behavioral Decision Making on Decisions from Experience). In addition the winner will be invited speakers in a special workshop that will be conducted in Israel in December 2008 (expenses up to $2000 per winner will be covered).
Conferences:
Behavioral Decision Research in Management Conference, April 24-26 2008, UC San Diego.
Conference on the Method of Modern Experimental Economics, April 27-28, 2008, NYU. Here are my slides, for a talk called "Has Experimental Economics Lived Up To Its Promise?" (I didn't pick the title...)
2008 International Economic Science Association Conference at Cal Tech, June 26-9, 2008. Yan Chen (Michigan), Paul Milgrom (Stanford), Peter Bossaerts (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), and Antonio Rangel (Caltech) will give the keynote lectures.
IAREP/SABE 2008 at LUISS in Rome, Sept. 3-6. (I will be giving the Kahneman Lecture) (This is a joint meeting of The International Association for Research in Economic Psychology and The Society for Advancement of Behavioral Economics.)
The 2008 European Meetings of the Economic Science Association, September 11-14 in Lyon. (Keynote speakers will be Bruno Biais, Gary Charness, Charles Noussair, and Lise Vesterlund).
Sign up here for economics experiments at Harvard's Computer Lab for Experimental Research
Iowa electronic markets. trade a variety of contracts, both financial and political, which change over time. One of the research interests of this long running set of investigations is the ability of markets to forecast events. (See also the related Austrian Political Stock Markets in Vienna, and UBC Election Stock Markets in Canada.) Conferences
Charlie Holt the veteran experimenter at the U. of Virginia is also a leader in bringing experimental games into the classroom, and has some thoughts and resources on the subject here
Here is John Hey's class Introduction to Experimental Economics.
Martin Shubik at Yale has a 2001 paper on the use of "teaching games"
A newsletter devoted to bringing experiments into the classroom for instructional purposes, Classroom Expernomics was published for several years by Greg Delemeester at Marietta College in Ohio, and John Neral at Frostburgh State University in Maryland.
The Fall 1993 issue of the Journal of Economic Education is concerned with classroom experiments.
A more recent article in that Journal is Asker, John, Brit Grosskopf, C. Nicholas McKinney, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth and Georg WeizsŠcker, "Teaching auction strategy using experiments administered via the Internet," Journal of Economic Education, 35, 4, Fall 2004, 330-342.
A nice description of studying experimental economics, from Experiments with Economic Principles by Ted Bergstrom and John Miller, is
"Taking a course in experimental economics is a little like going to dinner at a cannibal's house. Sometimes you will be the diner, sometimes you will be part of the dinner, sometimes both." Their page describes the book, and includes links to some courses that use it.
Marko Grobelnik , Robert A. Miller and Vesna Prasnikar have posted some downloadable software (for matrix games and extensive form games) for running classroom experiments.
Here are some links to philosophers who do experiments, to philosophers who think about game theory, and to philosophers of science who think about experimental economics and game theory.
Francesco Guala (whose links include a list of other philosophers of economics and related resources)
Joshua Knobe has an Experimental Philosophy page and coordinates the Experiments in Philosophy blog (hosted by Psychology Today).
Thomas Nadelhoffer coordinates the Experimental Philosophy blog.
Here are some critiques of experimental economics (updated 3/17/08) that I initially compiled for my class in Fall 2005, and have sporadically updated, including contributions by Gul and Pesendorfer, Gale, Levitt and List, Shaked, and Rubinstein, along with some replies, and some critiques of earlier vintage. (I am old enough to remember when no one felt moved to write criticisms of experimental econ:-)
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In the general scientific community, particularly in the highly competitive (for credit, for grants, etc.) biological sciences, there has started to be a good deal of discussion about what constitutes improper conduct in (and of) science. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be hard to set simple rules for complex matters. But the occasional hair-raising abuse makes it clear that we have an obligation to at least think about these issues (and make sure that our graduate students are aware of them).
The following links are discussions of scientific conduct. While the examples aren't drawn from economics, some of the issues (such as the allocation of credit among researchers) will be relevant even to theorists, and many more will be relevant to experimenters and other empirical types.
On Being A Scientist: Responsible Conduct In Research Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine.
The National Academies Press also has online an older book Responsible Science, Volume I: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process (1992)
See also the editorial Ambiguity in the Practice of Science by Frederick Grinnell, in the 19 April 1996 issue of Science.
David Goodstein of Cal Tech points out that Scientific Misconduct as it is practiced is less likely to be outright fraud than misconduct as a referee, etc.
See an
annotated bibliography of scientific misconduct, compiled for psychologists.
The Newsletters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Research Integrity have chilling "Case Summaries" on research misconduct at the end of (it seems) every issue.
A bigger issue than scientific misconduct is how scientists should avoid fooling themselves. This is one of the important uses of good experimental design. A famous early lecture on erroneous results in the physical sciences has been transcribed as Langmuir's talk on Pathological Science (December 18, 1953)
See also my paper, "Let's Keep the Con Out of Experimental Econ.."
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Gary Bolton and
Elena Katok at Penn State.
Yan Chen at the University of Michigan.
David Cooper at Florida State
Vincent Crawford at UCSD.
Martin Dufwenberg, University of Arizona.
John Duffy at Pitt.
Drew Fudenberg at Harvard.
David Levine at UCLA and Washington
U.
John Morgan at Berkeley.
Matt Rabin at Berkeley, already has some of his papers on procrastination posted, and on fairness.
Bob Slonim at Case Western Reserve University.
Dale Stahl at the University of Texas.
Axel Ockenfels at the University of Cologne.
Mark Walker and
John Wooders, both at the University of Arizona.
Bill Zame at UCLA.
Ken Binmore is director of a project called Economic Learning and Social Evolution.
The Center For Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , including their experimental lab,
