This is a commentary on Vernon Smith's contributions to experimental economics

We present the Progressive Second Price auction, a new decentralized mechanism for allocation of variable-size shares of a resource among multiple users. Unlike most mechanisms in the economics litterature, PSP is designed with a very small message space, making it suitable for real-time market...

The paper discusses the relation between experimental economics and the cognitive approach, after having outlined the chief characteristics of the major lines of research in both areas, also with reference to the historical development and to methodological issues. Then the attention is focused...

Edgeworth exchange is the fundamental general equilibrium model, yet equilibrium predications and theories of price adjustment for this model remain untested. This paper reports an experimental test of Edgeworth exchange which demonstrates that prices and allocations converge sharply to the...

This paper considers bidding automata programmed by experienced subjects in sequential first price sealed bid auction experiments. These automata play against each other in computer tournaments. The risk neutral subgame perfect Nash equilibrium strategy of the independent private value model...

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do unusual aspects of survey interviews affect these measures? An experiment on a nationally representative sample of over 1200 Americans provides an answer. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of four groups. A control group...

In a seminal paper Bagwell (1995) claims that the first mover advantage, i.e. the strategic benefit of committing oneself to an action before others can do, vanishes completely if this action is only imperfectly observed by second movers. In our paper we report on an experimental test of this...

This paper aims at studying the effects of learning - seen as a possible source of individual heterogeneity - on team functioning, in an experimental game requiring cooperation and coordination. It contributes to the new emergent cognitive approach to Economics. The empirical analysis starts...

This paper aims to analyze and exemplify some methodological implications on the way to conduct experiments related to the adoption of a cognitive approach in Economics. Many differences arise in relation to a more traditional way. In fact cognitive economics has strong descriptive attention and...

We experimentally test for the effect of an additional alternative on the measured risk preferences of farmers in rural Peru. In our experiment, subjects revealed their risk preferences with a series of choices between two gambles. We added a third gamble, which was always dominated by one of...