From January 5 – 9, 2016, the 21st Visiting Graduate Student Workshop in Experimental Economics was held at Chapman University. Sponsored by IFREE since 1997, the purpose of this workshop is to provide an introduction to laboratory methods in economics for PhD students.
Billur Aksoy and Mackenzie Alston, students of the PhD Program at Texas A&M, Department of Economics, participated in this workshop and interacted with Dr. Vernon Smith.
Daniel Fragiadakis and Daniel Stephenson traveled to Austin, Texas, to present research at the fourth Texas Economic Theory Camp held at the University of Texas at Austin from November 14 – 15, 2015. The purpose of the camp is to foster greater interaction among researchers working in pure and applied economic theory in Texas as well as to provide a forum for scholars to present their current research.
Daniel Stephenson presented his paper “Coordination and Evolutionary Stability in Attacker- Defender Games.” This study investigates the empirical validity of dynamic evolutionary models in continuous-time laboratory experiments with attacker-defender games.
This research studied two treatments: control and coordinated. Consistent with the theory, behavior is tightly clustered around the equilibrium in the control treatment. In the coordinated treatment, however, there are large cyclical deviations from the Nash Equilibrium. These results suggest that coordination incentives can lead to more predictable attacks in attacker-defender games.
Faculty and PhD students of Texas A&M’s Department of Economics presented their research at the Economics Science Association (ESA) North American meeting in Dallas, Texas. The conference draws some of the most important researchers in economic science. This year’s plenary speaker was Iris Bohnet.
The presenters and research topics during the conference were (in session order):
On Thursday, October 22, 2015, a workshop was held in honor of Dr. John Van Huyck at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, TX. Dr. Van Huyck passed away in 2014.
More than 60 people from all over the country were in attendance. Larry Samuelson of Yale University delivered the plenary address on “The State of Game Theory.” The program consisted of 12 papers and the presenters included many of Dr. Van Huyck’s friends, colleagues, and students. Two of the papers listed Dr. Van Huyck as a coauthor.
The conference was organized by Catherine Eckel of Texas A&M University and Yan Chen of the University of Michigan. They extend a special thank you to Mr. Al Van Huyck, the father of Dr. Van Huyck, for sponsoring the event. Thanks also to the 12 presenters and to Tim Salmon of SMU for his assistance.
The program is here [wp-svg-icons icon=”file-pdf” wrap=”i”]
For more details on Dr. Van Huyck, please click here.
Faculty and PhD students of the Department of Economics presented their research at the Economics Science Association (ESA) North American meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The conference gathers some of the most important personalities and researchers of the Economic Science. This year the keynote speakers were John Kagel (Ohio State) and Rebecca Morton (NYU), both former faculty at Texas A&M University.
This year’s program included a special ceremony in memory of John Van Huyck, former faculty of our department, who died on September 11, 2014. The ceremony showed the great appreciation and respect for John, both as a researcher of great intellectual stature and as a great colleague in the discipline. Catherine Eckel, Alex Brown and Ajalavat Viriyavipart (grad student) offered their personal memories of John, while David Cooper (FSU); friend, colleague and coauthor, put in perspective John’s great contributions to the discipline of Experimental and Behavioral Economics.
The presenters and research topics during the conference were the following (in session order):
The Economic Research Laboratory is deeply saddened to report the passing of a founder and current co-director of the ERL, Dr. John Van Huyck. John’s experimental research on coordination, performed at A&M, permanently altered how economists thought about game theory as well as how future game theory experiments were designed. He will be sorely missed. For more details about his life, click here and his research, click here
Several members of the ERL team, including Catherine Eckel, Haley Harwell, and Daniel Stephenson attended the conference and presented new experimental research. Topics included labor markets, field experiments, market design, and social norms at the 2014 European Economic Science Association Meetings in Prague, Czech Republic.
Three ERL graduate student staff members completed their PhDs this year. In all three of their theses, experimental economics research, done in the ERL, played a prominent role. All three will move on to faculty positions. J. Forrest Williams will be a new assistant professor in the Economics Department at Portland State University; Xiaoyuan Wang will be a new assistant professor in the School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China ; Hui-Chun Peng will be a new assistant professor at Tunghai University.
As part of the ERL´s Humanities and Social Science Enhancement of Research Capacity grant, the Economic Research Laboratory and the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University will host the first ever Texas Experimental Association Symposium (TExAS). The symposium will highlight research in experimental social science done by research with current or past Texas affiliations, in the hope of increasing experimental collaborations across Texas institutions. Keynote speakers are former Texas A&M faculty, John Kagel (Ohio State) and Rebecca Morton (New York University). Conference participants include current and former faculty at Texas institutions, former graduate students at Texas institutions as well as the current faculty at the Economic Research Laboratory, Alex Brown, Catherine Eckel, Daniel Fragiadakis and John Van Huyck. Full details for the conference can be found on the ERL website here.
Gregory Cohen, a former student and Economics Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scholar, published an extension of his undergraduate thesis in the journal, Experimental Economics. The experimental research, co-authored with his advisor, Alex Brown was run in the ERL during April and May 2013. It shows that the guarantee of anonymity for subjects in eliciting their valuations for items in the lab, thought to be crucial for a fundamental finding in experimental economics, makes no difference in achieving that finding. The article can be found here