Vernon L. Smith

BOD, President/Founder and Secretary

Vernon Smith

Vernon Smith

Vernon L. Smith is Founder and President of IFREE and has joint appointments with the Argyros School of Business & Economics and the School of Law, and he is part of a team that created and runs the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University.

Dr. Smith is widely recognized as the “father of experimental economics” and is additionally recognized for seminal contributions to production theory, public choice, environmental economics, behavioral economics and has been foundational in the emerging field of neuroeconomics.

On December 10, 2002 Dr. Smith received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – the Nobel Prize in Economics – from His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf for “having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms.”

Please read the President’s letter from September 2021.

Vernon Smith in 1997
Nobel Prize
Vernon Smith continues to lecture