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Earlier this year, a team of seven distinguished economics professors from the University of Arizona joined the faculty at George Mason University. This team is working in the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES), now located on the Arlington Campus of George Mason. These economists are founders and leaders of the growing area of experimental economics. The field of experimental economics tests economic theories under laboratory conditions by devising and running markets and electronic trading systems with real people. Using real dollar payoffs, these tests create real-world incentives to help understand why markets work the way they do. This group will work closely with the School of Law and School of Management on research projects and new courses.
Three members of this group will hold joint professor positions with the School of Law, and new courses are set to begin in the Spring of 2002. The first course to be offered is entitled Building Exchange Systems for Law, which is being taught by Vernon Smith, Kevin McCabe, and Bart Wilson. Below is biographical information on these members of the team, in addition to two stories about how this group came to George Mason University.
B.S.E.E., California Institute of Technology
M.A., University of Kansas
Ph.D., Harvard University
Honorary Doctor of Management, Purdue University
VERNON L. SMITH is Professor of Law and Economics at George Mason University, a research scholar in the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, and a Fellow of the Mercatus Center, all in Arlington, VA. He received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Cal Tech, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. He has written or cowritten over 200 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics and experimental economics. He serves or has served on the board of editors of the American Economic Review, The Cato Journal, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Science, Economic Theory, Economic Design, Games and Economic Behavior, and the Journal of Economic Methodology. He is past president of the Public Choice Society, the Economic Science Association, the Western Economic Association and the Association for Private Enterprise Education.
B.S., University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
M.A., Ph.D., University of Arizona
BART J. WILSON joins the law school as part of the newly formed Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) at George Mason University. He has an appointment in the Department of Economics as an Associate Professor, with affiliations in the Schools of Management and Law. Professor Wilson's broad fields of specialty are industrial organization, experimental economics, and econometrics. More specifically, he is pursuing research on e-commerce and deregulated electricity markets. His other research program applies the experimental method to topics in antitrust.
Professor Wilson has published papers in the Journal of Economic Theory, Economic Theory, and Experimental Economics and has a paper forthcoming in the RAND Journal of Economics. The National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics have supported his research. Professor Wilson extensively uses experimental economics in teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in e-commerce, microeconomics, and industrial organization.
B.S., Villanova University
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
KEVIN A. MCCABE is Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. He also holds appointments at the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, the Mercatus Center, and the Krasnow Institute. He received his bachelor's degree in Economics from Villanova University and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Previous faculty appointments include Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, and Associate Professor of Accounting in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He has written or cowritten over 50 articles on market design, industrial organization, game theory, monetary theory, behavioral economics, and experimental economics and has been co-principal investigator on many National Science Foundation grants, including a recent NSF tyo study "Brain Function and Economic Decision Making, 2001-2003." He is an editorial board member for the Review of Accounting Studies and the Journal of Experimental Economics and has served as a USAID consultant in helping to establish an M.B.A. program at the Warsaw School of Economics in Poland.