Vernon L. Smith

An American economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, along with Daniel Kahneman, for his research in experimental economics. He has shown the importance of alternative market institutions and has developed wind-tunnel tests for alternative market designs. His research has also explored capital theory, finance, natural resource economics, industrial organization, property rights economics and neuroeconomics.

Smith was born in Kansas in 1927. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and has taught economics at numerous universities, including Purdue, Stanford, Brown, the University of Massachusetts, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona, George Mason University and Chapman University. Among his many other achievements, Smith is a Senior Fellow at free-market think tank The Cato Institute, a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the board of editors of numerous economics journals.