Prize Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1994.

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 29, 1920. The high school my parents chose for me was the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, one of the best schools in Hungary, with such distinguished alumni as John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner. I was very happy in this school and received a superb...

Understanding how physicians respond to incentives from payment schemes is a central concern in health economics research. We introduce a controlled laboratory experiment to analyse the influence of incentives from fee-for-service and capitation payments on physicians’ supply of medical...

In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to imitate similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such imitation can be consistent with self-interested behaviour. We propose that this consistency requires the existence...

In spring 2000, the British government auctioned off licences for Third Generation mobile telecommunications services. In the preparation of the auction, two designs involving each a hybrid of an English and a sealed-bid auction were suggested by the government: a discriminatory and a uniform...

In studies concluding that public debt may hamper GDP growth, the debt tipping effects are estimated as if there were a single global currency. This means that such studies ignore the likely biggest cause of changes in growth rates, namely damage from exchange rate liquidity shocks because we do...

This article reports the results of a first-price sealed-bid auction experiment, which has been designed to test the Nash equilibrium predictions of individual bidding behavior. Subjects faced in 100 auctions always the same resale value and competed with computerized bids. Three treatments were...