Recap of a Decade: 1997—2007

RESEARCH
IFREE is funding, has funded, and/or seeks to fund research in:

  • specialization, exchange and property rights
  • reciprocity, trust and trustworthiness in personal exchange
  • statistical methods and economic modeling for experiments
  • financial market bubbles: behavior and modeling
  • joint venture property rights
  • network markets: electricity, natural gas, gasoline, and water
  • mechanisms in e-commerce
  • auction design: combinatorial, clock auctions
  • anti-trust: bundling and interchange pricing
  • policy analysis: pollution emissions, spectrum policy, space policy experiments in neuroeconomics

EDUCATION
Scholarships and Fellowships:

  • Graduate scholarships
    This year IFREE is supporting 9 graduate students with full or partial tuition waivers and has supplied research grants for subject payments to 9 advanced students. Over the 10 years since IFREE’s inception the number of students supported has averaged 6 per year in each category.
  • Pre-doc and Post-doc, Senior Faculty Visitors
    In 2007, IFREE is supporting one pre-doc visitor and two senior faculty visitors, and over the 10 years since its inception IFREE has regularly supported one pre-doc and one post-doc each year.
  • 2 Distinguished Fellows (since 1998)
  • 14 High School Summer Interns
  • First Summer Intern Program 2006: Six student interns participated.
  • Second Summer Intern Program 2007: Five students will participate.

OUTREACH WORKSHOPS
Graduate workshops since 1995; Undergraduate: 2005; High School: 1997

  • 323 participants from 12 week-long Visiting Graduate Student workshops in experimental economics. Their fields include economics, psychology, philosophy, political science, science, engineering and anthropology.
  • 450 participants from 19 week-long high school student workshops. As with the graduate students, their interests are broad ranging; most are now enrolled at prominent universities.
  • 60 from the recently inaugurated visiting undergraduate workshops.
  • 21 faculty located at 12 universities, many of whom are alumni of the IFREE graduate workshops and were pre- or post-doctoral visitors at George Mason University or the University of Arizona where IFREE originated.

INTERNATIONAL OUTREACH

  • IFREE co-sponsored the International IFREE-Tinker Conference on the Use of Experimental Economics in Resource Allocation in Electricity and Water Markets in Spain (1999)
  • co-sponsored faculty, graduate student workshop at initiation of Experimental Economics Research Center Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2003)
  • IFREE 10th Anniversary Conference and Gala: ‘Understanding Exchange Systems:10 Years of Research and Education’ (2007)

SPEAKER SERIES

  • Science of Liberty Speaker Series: to promote collaborative discussion of market-oriented solutions to contemporary policy issues

SOFTWARE AND PROGRAMING

  • hand held ultra-portable PC’s for demonstrations, workshops, seminars
  • experimental economics programmer support, 2006–2007
  • programming in 2006-2007 of 16 teaching experiments for both PC networks and the ultra-portable PC’s

ASSISTANCE WITH BOOK MANUSCRIPTS (expected publication date 2008)

  • Economic Systems Design: Market Design Principles and Applications, Dave Porter
  • Analyzing Economics Experiments the Right Way (working title), Mark Olson