Nobel Prize-Winning Economist to Speak at University of Richmond

January 10, 2003

Vernon Smith, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, will deliver the annual Thomas S. Berry Lecture in Economic History Jan. 27 at the University of Richmond. The 7:30 p.m. presentation is free and open to the public at Jepson Alumni Center, but seating is limited to the first 300 people.

The Nobel Prize committee honored Smith for "having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis." Smith essentially created the field of experimental economics, which tests economic theories in the classroom or laboratory.

Before 1956, when Smith completed his first experiment, economic theory assumed that markets are efficient only with a large number of buyers and sellers. Smith's experiments proved that markets can be efficient even with a very few participants. Some economic experiments also suggest that human beings act in ways that were effective in our previous evolutionary environment tens of thousands of years ago. Smith's lecture will discuss the questions and anomalies raised by experiments in trading.

Smith is professor of economics and law at George Mason University, where he also is a research scholar in the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science and a fellow of the Mercatus Center, a non-profit research and educational institution dedicated to improving public policy outcomes. Smith has authored or co-authored over 200 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics and experimental economics.