Abstract
Here we are. The final session came around much more rapidly than I had imagined. My plan is now to turn towards the final of the four themes—the labs. I wanted to explore some of the historical developments related to them. With a view of trying to pursue some chronology, I am going to begin this session by asking particular individuals about their experiences, and then, later on, draw people in. If you want to chip into those, then, feel free, but I also want to pursue a particular line. I was going to start with Stephen, actually, if I may, and ask you a bit about your first experiences of an experimental lab, which I think would probably be in Vernon’s lab in Arizona.
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Notes
- 1.
PLATO is an abbreviation of Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations.
- 2.
CDC or Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm that built the fastest computers in the world in the 1960s.
- 3.
Editor: What is a T1 line precisely? How much did it cost? Stephen Rassenti: “A T1 line, or DS1, is a digital transmission link with a capacity of 1.544 Mbps. It cost us $3,000 per month, which was a high price for data communications at that time.”
- 4.
See Chapter 2, Footnote 76 and Chapter 3, Footnote 76.
- 5.
See Chapter 2, Footnote 76.
- 6.
Programmed Data Processor was the name of a series of minicomputers made by Digital Equipment Corporation.PDP-8 was the first commercially successful minicomputer and used 12-bit processors.
- 7.
For a detailed description of the laboratory see: Hoggatt, Austin C.; Joseph Esherick and John T. Wheeler. 1969. “A Laboratory to Facilitate Computer-Controlled Behavioral Experiments.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 14(2), 202–07.
- 8.
Fromkin, Howard L. Ibid.”The Behavioral Science Laboratories at Purdue's Krannert School.” 171–77. See also Chapter 2, Footnote 38.
- 9.
Smith left Purdue in 1967. Plott left Purdue for Caltech in 1971.
- 10.
National Science Foundation: “Information Impact and Information Processing in Common Value Auctions,” 7/15/84 - 7/14/89, with Dan Levin.
- 11.
PCC or Pasadena City College, is a community college conveniently located a few blocks away from Caltech.
- 12.
Since October 1984 Plott in collaboration with the Computer Science Department of the Southern University in Alabama was investigating various pricing mechanisms for NASA Space Station services. This motivated Plott to seek additional support from companies such as GM and IBM; private and public funding agencies. All funding was approved during summer 1987 and physical equipment was installed in the fall 1987. Plott received $400,000 from General Motors and $500,000 from the Bradley Foundation. Plott opened the Caltech Laboratory of Experimental Economics and Political Science (EEPS) in 1987.
- 13.
Messages sent to client terminals at the same time.
- 14.
In 1995 Plott submitted a proposal for a National Science Foundation instrumentation grant. This scheme was open to all laboratory sciences and engineering on a competitive basis and grants amounted up to eight hundred thousand dollars over a two-year period. Plott became the first social scientist ever to receive such a grant.
- 15.
Ubuntu is a Linux-based operating system.
- 16.
For more details see http://marketscape.caltech.edu/wiki [Accessed on March 31, 2015].
- 17.
The Social Science Experimental Laboratory (SSEL) was opened in the summer 1999 and has run by a group of Caltech experimentalists – Tom Palfrey, John Ledyard, Colin Camerer, William Zame, and formerly Richard McKelvey, Jacob Goeree, Peter Boessarts, and Liat Yariv. Palfrey and McKelvey jointly designed the laboratory.
- 18.
fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging.
- 19.
It is the Office of Faculty Research.
- 20.
Robert Slonim (now at the University of Sydney) and David Cooper (now at the Florida State University) were experimenters at Case Western in 1998–2004 and 1999–2007 respectively.
- 21.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for hiring workers who can perform tasks from home. https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome [Accessed on March 31, 2015].
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Svorenčík, A., Maas, H. (2016). Laboratories. In: Svorenčík, A., Maas, H. (eds) The Making of Experimental Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20952-4_6
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