Dr. Vernon L. Smith was teaching at Purdue in 1955 when he decided to test out an approach he hoped would help his students better understand how the marketplace functions. He conducted a classroom experiment that had half his students selling fictitious goods to the other students who were acting as buyers. That led to his research in experimental economics which eventually won him the Nobel Prize in 2002.
Dr. Smith gave the annual George S. Eccles Memorial Lecture in Economics at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at USU in November, speaking on understanding recessions since 1929, focusing on the relationship between housing-mortgage markets and market volatility. Dr. Smith is President and founder of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics.
