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Economics as Lab Science: Nobel Prizes Give Boost to Growing Field

Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith, who shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science, were both cited for results obtained via laboratory experiment. Until quite recently, experimentation was deemed revolutionary in economics, and viewed with some distrust. Today, it is increasingly well regarded—thanks in large part to Kahneman, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and a professor of public affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Smith, a professor of economics and of law at George Mason University. Web pages devoted to experimental economics currently abound, the ten-year-old Economic Science Association publishes a journal titled Experimental Economics, and many of the older journals have begun to publish experimental results. Kahneman wrote his landmark paper [5] on decision-making under conditions of uncertainty in the late 1970s with Amos Tversky, who would surely have shared Kahneman’s honor had he not died in 1996. During a press conference held at Princeton to announce his Nobel, Kahneman expressed doubt that he would ever have won the prize “if exactly the same paper had been published in a psychological journal.” Had it not appeared in a leading journal of economics, the paper would almost surely have failed to arouse the interest of economists in an alternative approach to the study of decision-making under uncertainty—one that focused on the shortcuts people take, and the biases they yield to, when making decisions in the absence of any obvious and systematic way to proceed. “When people can’t do what they want,” Kahneman said at the press conference, “they do what they can.” Apparently, this was “news to psychologists and economists.” By confirming it experimentally, Kahneman fathered a subdiscipline known as behavioral economics, the purpose of which is to introduce psychologically more realistic models of economic agents into economic theory. Such models are particularly important, according to Princeton economics chair Gene Grossman, for understanding equity markets in which investor psychology plays an obvious role. Traditional market models, in which all participants are rational, self-interested, and calculating agents endowed with perfect information and the means to exploit it, simply don’t explain the observed fluctuations of financial markets.