Vernon Smith
The Father of Experimental Economics
Intro
Raised on a farm in Kansas and having done his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, Vernon Smith didn’t necessarily expect to be called the forefather of a new type of economics. A keen interest in his senior year economics course at Caltech University, however, led Smith to pursue an MA in economics, if only to help him decide if it was where he wanted to continue his life’s work. Like many others, Smith’s path took unique twists and turns, which eventually led him to the field of experimental economics. Experimental economics uses real people, under controlled conditions, to test economic theories and hypotheses, in order to help policymakers make more accurate predictions about how economic concepts play out in practice. Since its introduction, experimental economics has helped economists, psychologists, and policymakers make more informed decisions about how different economic models might affect individuals and society.
I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.
– Vernon L. Smith
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
