2002 Nobel Laureate was at the Economics Department

2002 Nobel Laureate was UM’s First Hearin Distinguished Lecturer

The University of Mississippi’s Department of Economics is pleased to announce that the first speaker in the Distinguished Lecture Series in Economics, funded by the Robert M. Hearin Support Foundation, has been awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Professor Vernon L. Smith presented the first Distinguished Lecture in Economics in 1999, the first of three Nobel laureates in economics to visit Oxford and Ole Miss: In 2000, the Hearin Foundation also supported the lectures of Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker of the University of Chicago and James Buchanan of George Mason University. The fourth Hearin Distinguished Lecturer (in 2001) was economist Dr. Hugo Sonnenschein, president of the University of Chicago from 1993 to 2000.

Dr. Vernon L. Smith, now at George Mason University, shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Science with Daniel Kahneman, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton. Smith’s prize was awarded for founding the field of experimental economics. While at Purdue University in the 1960s and 1970s, Smith pioneered the use of controlled laboratory experiments to test the predictions of economic theory. He was also the first scholar to use controlled experiments as “wind tunnels” where economic scenarios, such as the transition from regulated to unregulated electricity markets, could be studied before being implemented in real-life. Dr. Smith continued that work when he moved from Purdue to the University of Arizona, where he founded a major experimental economics laboratory. Smith original and insightful contributions into the operation of auction markets and to the understanding of economic behavior in general have had major impacts on the economics profession and on public policymaking.

Dr. Mark Van Boeing, interim chair of the Department of Economics, wrote his dissertation under Vernon Smith at the University of Arizona. He also directs the Mississippi Experimental Research Laboratory, housed in Conner Hall. UM has TWO other Nobel connections in Hearin Professor Robert Tollison, who was a student of James Buchanan’s, when Buchanan was on the faculty of the University of Virginia, and Associate Professor Jon Moen, Who wrote his dissertation at the University of Chicago under Nobel laureate William Fogel.