Vernon L. Smith

Quotes

• “Even though Hayek, in my view, is the leading economic thinker of the 20th century who saw what must be the mainsprings of the extended order, Mises was the choice technician, and no one was better at articulating the primacy of the individual and the need to define and nurture individual rights.”
• “It is important to remove artificial barriers–stumbling stones, often local in origin and coming from incumbent opposition to entry–and to not burden businesses with taxes that reduce their internally generated funds for reinvestment, growth and striving to overcome market challenges.”
• “Three precepts are offered to constitute a foundation for the use of laboratory experimental methods in testing hypotheses about the behavior of allocation mechanisms.”
• “Nonsatiation (Smith, 1976a). Given a costless choice be ween two alternatives which differ only in that the first yields more of the reward medium (e.g., currency) than the second, the first will always be chosen (preferred) over the second by an autonomous individual, i.e., utility U(M) is a monotone increasing function of the reward medium.”
• “Complexity. In general individual decision makers must be assumed to have multidimensional values which attach nonmonetary subjective cost or value to (1) the process of making and executing individual or group decisions, (2) the end result of such decisions, and (3) the rewards (and perhaps behavior) of other individuals involved in the decision process.”
• “Parallelism: Propositions about the behavior of individuals and the performance of institutions that have been tested in laboratory microeconomies apply also to nonlaboratory environments where similar ceteris paribus conditions prevail.”

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Key facts

Born

Vernon Lomax Smith , ( 1927-01-01 ) January 1, 1927 (age 99) , Wichita, Kansas , U.S.

Education

California Institute of Technology ( BS ), University of Kansas ( MA ), Harvard University ( PhD )

Thesis

A theoretical and empirical inquiry into the economic replacement of capital equipment (1955)

Doctoral advisor

Wassily Leontief

Influences

Friedrich Hayek , Richard S. Howey

Discipline

Experimental economics

School or tradition

New classical economics

Notable ideas

Combinatorial auction , Experimental economics

Awards

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2002)

Website

Information at IDEAS / RePEc

via Wikipedia infobox

Key dates

Born

1 January 1927

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Wikidata facts

Instance of

human

Family name

Smith

Gender

male

Citizenship

United States

Place of birth

Wichita

Occupation

university teacher

Employer

Chapman University

Languages spoken

English language

Academic degree

doctorate

Doctoral advisor

Wassily Leontief

Field of work

economics

Image

Vernon L. Smith 2011.jpg

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