Nobel Prize lecture.

Interview with the 2002 Laureates in Economics, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith, December 12, 2002. Interviewers are Professor Karl-Gustaf Loefgren and Dr Anne-Sophie Crepin.

When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, (reason's) conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attained with difficulty (Hume, 1739/, p 507). we...

I was born Vernon Lomax Smith in Wichita, on the flat plains of Kansas, January 1, 1927 in the years leading to the Great Depression. Like many of my generation I am a product of the strange circumstances of survival, and of successes built on tragedy. This narrative is written from memory and...

Traditionally, economic theory has relied on the assumption of a "homo oeconomicus", whose behavior is governed by self-interest and who is capable of rational decision-making. Economics has also been regarded as a non-experimental science, where researchers -- as in astronomy or meteorology --...

I was born in Tel Aviv, in what is now Israel, in 1934, while my mother was visiting her extended family there; our regular domicile was in Paris. My parents were Lithuanian Jews, who had immigrated to France in the early 1920s and had done quite well. My father was the chief of research in a...