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

Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members can produce political support, however, can retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack...

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the impact of fraud detection systems on the auditing procedure and the equilibrium insurance contract, when a policyholder can report a loss that never occurred. Insurers can only detect fraudulent claims through a costly audit (costly state...

This paper studies an auction model in which one of the bidders, the insider, has better information about a common component of the value of the good for sale, than the other bidders, the outsiders. Our main result shows that the insider may have incentives to disclose her private information...

Search engines hold the key to helping consumers access the wealth of information on the web. In this paper I examine the evolution of and competition in the internet search engine market. The goal of my analysis is to examine whether early entrants benefit in the long-run from their first-mover...

In their seminal solution of the chain store paradox Kreps and Wilson assumed that the incumbent monopolist is predisposed, with a small probability, to fight entry. Milgrom and Roberts suggested to view this predisposition to fight as a result of precommitment to an aggressive course of action....

This paper analyses the mechanisms through which profit-sharing schemes may induce debt constrained firms to improve technical efficiency over time to guarantee positive profits. This hypothesis is first formalised in a partial equilibrium framework and then is tested on a sample of Italian...

Why are economists convinced that {\it homo economicus}\/ is selfish? No doubt we find considerable support for this hypothesis in the behavior of our colleagues. Beyond this, a plausible evolutionary argument for selfishness would assert that if natural selection favors those who receive high...

One of the most important aspects of consumer surveys is the computation of the consumer confidence index, which aims to provide accurate figures on the financial position and outlook of households as well as their intention concerning future consumption and savings. . Although the motion of the...

This comment shows why the Lagrange method can be simpler than dynamic programming in solving dynamic optimization problems.