Stephen V. Burks
Associate Professor, Division of Social Science, University of Minnesota, Morris
I came to the 1998 summer boot camp for grad students in Arizona as an economist who was intensively studying the trucking industry with conventional techniques. After you, Kevin, Steve, and the rest of the boot camp team converted me to the use of experimental methods, I told you all that I was inspired to go out and do experiments in the field with truck drivers.
Well, it took several years of development work, but a large team of researchers that I organized is now in the middle of a multi-year project, part of which involves running 1,000 truck drivers through a battery of 6 experiments, along with some other measures, and then following their work lives for two years. I’ll be proselytizing for the use of field experiments to the industry studies community, with a talk about the project, this April at the Sloan Industry Studies Annual Conference in Boston.
I credit the Arizona boot camp as one of the formative experiences that led me to develop this project, in collaboration with my co-investigators. Thanks again to you and the boot camp team for making the opportunity available!
Terrence Burnham
Research Scientist, Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University
IFREE’s mission “is to change the way people think about economics.” This is absolutely perfect. Economics is in a Dickensian state as being both the best and the worst social science. It is at its best when it seeks the truth about human behavior, and when it builds institutions to augment the best aspects of human nature. Economics is at its worst when it theorizes about mythical people and when it loses sight of the individual. By relentlessly focusing on the empirical aspects of behavior, and keeping the individual at the center, IFREE is an important force for improving economics and more.
Cary Deck
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Arkansas
The support of IFREE has been invaluable during my early career. While I was a graduate student, my IFREE fellowship afforded me the opportunity to work on several of my own projects, laying the basis for much of my work as a junior faculty member. The papers that resulted from my IFREE sponsored research have been published in several leading academic journals. In addition to these direct benefits to my own work, IFREE has enabled me to interact with many other experiential economists. This includes the senior researchers from whom I gained insight while providing research assistance, the numerous visiting IFREE scholars, and the participants in the graduate student workshops in which I have presented. In sum, IFREE has opened doors for my experimental economics research at every juncture.
Kyle Hampton
Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Through their generous financial support, IFREE provided me the freedom to pursue research projects of my own design, a distinctly rare privilege for a pre-doctoral student in a technical field. But perhaps even more important was their generous sponsorship of the Vernon L. Smith Workshops in Experimental Economics. In the course of my involvement with the workshops, I was able to see firsthand the potential for economic experiments to demonstrate the power and beauty of economics to young people; an experience that left me as inspired as the students themselves.
Cathleen Johnson
Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Arizona
My first association with IFREE was through a graduate workshop in the summer of 2000. From that experience, I returned to my new job at a policy research not-for-profit in Canada on fire and wanting to do experiments. I was in the right place at the right time. With the help of Catherine Eckel and Claude Montmarquette, I ran my first experiment which helped inform the implementation of large random assignment experiment on human capital investment by the poor. Several months later, Mary Ross contacted me and proposed that I return to Arizona for an IFREE funded post-doc, the Gilder-Humphreys Postdoctoral Fellow. Included in the post doc was a small pot of money for subject payments. Cary Deck and I made good use of those funds, using them to support the first experiment published on network formation. The experiences I had at the workshop and during my postdoctoral study period have continued to pay. I have continued to design and implement experiments for informing public policy in Canada in the areas of human capital development, matched income and tax revenue, and rent seeking in innovation. In addition, I have been able to organize and participate in several conferences and talks aimed at policy makers showing the virtues of experimental evidence.
Céline Jullien
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Grenoble
Vernon Smith and IFREE’s support gave me the fabulous opportunity to participate to the 3rd Annual Visiting Graduate Workshop in Experimental Economics in Tucson Arizona in 1997, and to do a post-doc at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic Science in Arlington a few years later in 2003. The workshop gave me the chance to learn a lot on the methodology of experimental economics, and to complete my Ph.D. in economics using market experiments. Later, the post-doc gave me the possibility to work with remarkable members of the laboratory such as Professor Steve Rassenti, and Abel Winn, a graduate student at the time. I learned and discovered new research issues in the electric power market design on which I am still working. This excellent working environment also gave me the occasion to meet people outside the Centre like Douglas Hale from the Department of Energy, Dean Williamson, economist at the Antitrust division, and Lynne Kiesling, from the Reason Public Policy Institute with whom I am still collaborating. Not only has this support given me great professional possibilities, but it also contributed to my personal accomplishment. Washington DC, Dupont Circle, the Smithsonian, the Independence Day are all among my best memories, as well as animated conversations with colleagues who became friends. Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Vernon Smith and the foundation for what they offered me. I was at a crossroads in my career, and this opportunity gave me the necessary impulse to become a professor of economics!
Praveen Kujal
Associate Professor of Economics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
IFREE has been instrumental in advancing my experimental research over the last few years. My first interaction with IFREE started in the organization of an international conference (jointly with Universidad Carlos III, the Tinker foundation and IFREE) in Madrid, Spain, in June of 1999. Policymakers and economists were brought together to discuss water allocation problems. A competitive grant from IFREE started my experimental research on water allocation using market mechanisms. This year I have had the opportunity to visit ICES and have started several research projects with faculty members. The stay has truly benefited me in terms of advancing my long latent (experimental) research agenda. This would have been only been partly possible without the support of IFREE. Further, two of my Ph.D. students from Universidad Carlos III have attended the IFREE summer school. Needless to say, they greatly benefited from the workshop.
Robert Kurzban
Assistant Professor, Psychology Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
After receiving my PhD from the University of California in 1998, I was supported for two years by IFREE as a postdoctoral fellow. During this time, I was given freedom to pursue my research interests and, much more importantly, had the opportunity to interact with members of the community who helped me to expand the conceptual tools and methodological techniques at my disposal. The value of these for my growth as a scientist and researcher cannot be overstated. By working with people with some of the sharpest minds it has ever been my pleasure to know, I was able to approach research questions from multiple perspectives, allowing me to gain traction on issues that would have been far more difficult if not impossible without the breadth of perspective that my interactions at IFREE afforded. The results for me have been both substantial and tangible. The IFREE-sponsored research I conducted, and the work that has proceeded downstream from it, played a key role in helping me obtain my current position, and continues to allow me to conduct research that has been very well received by the academic community. The training that I received, with its emphasis on experimental economics, supplemented my training in psychology has allowed me to do genuinely interdisciplinary research that I hope will continue to be of value to the broader scientific enterprise in which we are all engaged.
Jim Murphy
Rasmuson Chair of Economics, University of Alaska Anchorage
Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Attending the IFREE Graduate Student Workshop in 1998 opened doors to an exciting new world. Experiments help to make economics come alive and seem even more useful to today’s pressing policy debates. My experiences with the folks associated with IFREE have fundamentally changed the way I approach my research and teaching. It has enabled me to think more broadly about institutions and the design of new policies, including water markets in the western US, common-pool resources in rural Colombia, fisheries management in Alaska, and water quality trading in Australia. Without the generous support of IFREE, none of this would have been possible. I will always be grateful for the opportunities that Vernon Smith and IFREE have given me. (I attended the IFREE Graduate Student Workshop in 1998; was a 1998-99 IFREE Visiting Pre-Doctoral Scholar, University of Arizona; and I presented at the IFREE Graduate Student Workshop in 2001-2004, 2006; I plan to present in 2007 as well).
Ryan Oprea
Assistant Professor in Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz
As an IFREE fellow I was given support that enabled me to focus all of my energies on learning how to use experimental methods to study economic problems. IFREE also generously funded much of my early research, allowing me to not only learn first hand how to conduct experimental research but also to get a start as a published researcher. It is no exaggeration to say that IFREE was an indispensable part of my development as an experimental economist. Simply put, no other organization provides the kind of support and counsel that IFREE does.
Mary Rigdon
Assistant Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
I held an IFREE Post-Doctoral Fellowship from 2001-2002 at George Mason University. During my time as a post-doc, I was able to extend and build on the work that I began in my dissertation on how and why people reach cooperative and mutually beneficial outcomes in bargaining environments that favor no exchange at all. In that year, four papers from that research were written: one on labor markets (published in the Proc. National Academy of Sciences in 2002); one testing between fairness-based models and intentions-based models of reciprocal behavior (joint work with Kevin McCabe and Vernon Smith, published in JEBO in 2003); one on how sorting-and-matching rules that cluster populations of cooperators together sustain trusting/trustworthy behavior (joint work with Kevin McCabe and Vernon Smith, to appear in Economic Journal in 2007); and an overview of some of our results in the trust game (published in an edited collection in 2002). I also wrote a substantial grant proposal for a large set of experiments testing how punishments and rewards impact off-equilibrium cooperation in bargaining (a project that is still on-going); the National Science Foundation funded the proposal the following year. I presented some of this work that year at several conferences (including the Economic Science Association meetings and the American Economic Association meetings) and gave invited talks at Tilburg University (Netherlands), Charles University (Prague), and The University of Texas at Austin. Most importantly, the fellowship afforded me ample research time, a productive environment, and the opportunity to interact with remarkable research colleagues at ICES.
Karl Schurter, 17
Senior, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, VA
I am forever indebted to IFREE for laying open so many opportunities with its educational outreach programs. I was a sophomore in high school when IFREE first introduced me to experimental economics through a fun and stimulating workshop. Since then, IFREE and its members have helped cultivate my interest in experimental economics to the point where I am now conducting original research as a senior in high school. Their enthusiasm and guidance has created the perfect learning environment at every step of the way. I am sincerely grateful for everything that IFREE has done for me and everything they will continue to do for other young minds.
Bart Wilson
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
Without IFREE’s generous support for my career, first as a John M. Olin Pre-doctoral Fellow and then as post-doctoral scholar and professor, my thinking as a teaching and researching economist would have tracked the traditional knowledge base of the field. My experimental designs would have remained safe and (hopefully) acceptable to the National Science Foundation. IFREE, however, supported my first attempt to try something different and implement a near continuous-time market to understand e-commerce pricing strategies. I didn’t realize that taking this incremental procedural step would permanently alter the trajectory of my thinking about competition in markets. From these and subsequent experiments I began to see market behavior, not through the lens of conventional static models that I dutifully learned as a student, but as a dynamic discovery process. Once on that path, experimental economics became a way for me to work on how I understand a world shaped by exchange. I no longer came to form a research question as “Does this stylized model organize behavior?” Rather, the operative question became “Why do we observe the exchange systems that we do?” I began to see the genius of the Scottish Enlightenment—economics as emergent orders—vibrantly come to life in the laboratory. For over 8 years in workshops for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, IFREE has supported my experimentation with how to use experimental economics to teach economics. In addition to learning-by-doing the technique and methods of experimental economics, these workshops uniquely encourage thinking about economics as an exploration of rule-governed orders of exchange. IFREE has also generously funded software development and a portable laboratory of hand-held computers on which to conduct experimental economics seminars with practitioners, policy and educational groups. These programs continue to be some of my most rewarding and fun experiences with teaching. Thank you.
Abel Winn
Director of Experimental Economics, Market Based Management Institute, Wichita State University
As a graduate student at George Mason University, I wanted to write my dissertation on the affects of fiat currency inflation in an experimental economy. The required experimental design was sufficiently large that gathering the necessary funding (well over $20,000) could have proved a big obstacle. As a graduate student I was in no position to fund the experiments myself, and obtaining sufficient grants from a number of funding institutions would have been both time consuming and uncertain. However, IFREE was willing to extend a grant that covered the full cost of the experiments, and allowed me to complete my research in a timely fashion. The degree I earned was a real asset in allowing me to advance at my place of employment at the time, Booz Allen Hamilton. More importantly, the experience I gained from the research IFREE funded has been invaluable as I oversee the development of an experimental economics laboratory at Wichita State University.
Erte Xiao
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
My career progress and academic growth is inseparable from the great support of IFREE. With little knowledge of experimental economics, I started my journey of pursuing a Ph.D in economics in the United States. In Professor Daniel Houser’s class I became fascinated by research in experimental economics. I was fortunately able to receive support from IFREE and to join Professor Vernon Smith’s research group in ICES. In 2003, IFREE funded my first experimental research project. Together with other faculty in ICES, I used experiments to investigate why monetary punishment might reduce cooperation. Since then, I have been funded by IFREE to conduct several other experimental projects in the area of punishment, trust, cooperation and emotion. One of the works was published in PNAS in 2005, and several other papers will be published over the next months. IFREE funding also enabled me to present my research in many conferences in the United States and abroad. IFREE’s support helped me to attend many summer schools in the United States and Europe, where I met students and faculty from all over the world and who have similar research interests. All these experiences, I believe, will have great benefit for my future career. In 2006, I earned my Ph.D. and was offered post-doctoral fellowship at University of Pennsylvania, including an appointment at the Wharton School. This is an excellent environment for me to continue my research in experimental economics. I would like to thank IFREE for opening doors to many great opportunities that have helped to position me for a successful academic career.
Artie Zillante
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina
I was an IFREE post-doctoral scholar for the 2004 and 2005 academic years. The time I spent in that position allowed me to gain a broader view of the experimental methodology due to the depth of knowledge and experience provided by the surrounding research faculty. IFREE also provided resources that allowed me to conduct additional experimental sessions for research from my dissertation, and five new research projects were either funded by IFREE or spawned from contact with individuals associated with IFREE. In addition, my participation as an instructor in the summer high school and graduate workshops sponsored by IFREE aided in my development of a Master’s level course on game theory and experimental economics at my current assistant professor position in the economics department of UNC-Charlotte. An undergraduate course devoted solely to experimental economics is currently being developed and plans are being made to begin a week long summer workshop for high school students, modeled after the IFREE summer workshops, in the Charlotte area. As one can see, the impact of IFREE on both my scholarly and pedagogical activities has been extensive.