John D. Hey – författare

Experimental economics is a rapidly growing and influential branch of the discipline. In this two volume set the editors have bought together nine topics, including methodological concerns, preference reversals, willingness to pay and willingness to accept, bargaining and auctions, which illustrate the progress made in this area and the current state of play. For each topic they have selected a series of important previously published papers, to which they have added an editorial commentary that sets them in context and indicates which directions future experimental work on these topics might most profitably take.

Until recently, 'Subjective Expected Utility Theory' was accepted within the economics profession as the theory of rational decision-making under risk and under certainty. However, its pre-eminence in recent years has been undermined as a consequence of a flood of experimental evidence casting doubt on its descriptive accuracy. This book documents the theoretical reconstruction of the theory of decision-making in the aftermath of this flood. It is divided into three parts and contains the key papers introducing and describing new theories of decision under risk, new theories of decision under uncertainty and new theories of dynamic decision-making.

This volume contains a selection consisting of the best papers presented at the FUR XII conference, held at LUISS in Roma, Italy, in June 2006, organized by John Hey and Daniela Di Cagno. The objectives of the FUR (Foundations of Utility and Risk theory) conferences have always been to bring together leading academics from Economics, Psychology, Statistics, Operations Research, Finance, Applied Mat- matics, and other disciplines, to address the issues of decision-making from a g- uinely multi-disciplinary point of view. This twelfth conference in the series was no exception. The early FUR conferences - like FUR I (organized by Maurice Allais and Ole Hagen) and FUR III (organized by Bertrand Munier) - initiated the move away from the excessively rigid and descriptively-inadequate modelling of beh- iour under risk and uncertainty that was in vogue in conventional economics at that time. More than twenty years later, things have changed fundamentally, and now - novations arising from the FUR conferences, and manifesting themselves in the new behavioural economics, are readily accepted by the profession.Working with new models of ambiguity, and bounded rationality, for example, behavioural decision making is no longer considered a sign of mere non-standard intellectual diversi?- tion. FUR XII was organised with this new spirit. In the sense that the behavioural concerns initiated by the ?rst FUR conferences are now part of conventional e- nomics, and the design and organisation of FUR XII re?ects this integration, FUR XII represents a key turning point in the FUR conference series.

This volume contains a selection consisting of the best papers presented at the FUR XII conference, held at LUISS in Roma, Italy, in June 2006, organized by John Hey and Daniela Di Cagno. The objectives of the FUR (Foundations of Utility and Risk theory) conferences have always been to bring together leading academics from Economics, Psychology, Statistics, Operations Research, Finance, Applied Mat- matics, and other disciplines, to address the issues of decision-making from a g- uinely multi-disciplinary point of view. This twelfth conference in the series was no exception. The early FUR conferences - like FUR I (organized by Maurice Allais and Ole Hagen) and FUR III (organized by Bertrand Munier) - initiated the move away from the excessively rigid and descriptively-inadequate modelling of beh- iour under risk and uncertainty that was in vogue in conventional economics at that time. More than twenty years later, things have changed fundamentally, and now - novations arising from the FUR conferences, and manifesting themselves in the new behavioural economics, are readily accepted by the profession.Working with new models of ambiguity, and bounded rationality, for example, behavioural decision making is no longer considered a sign of mere non-standard intellectual diversi?- tion. FUR XII was organised with this new spirit. In the sense that the behavioural concerns initiated by the ?rst FUR conferences are now part of conventional e- nomics, and the design and organisation of FUR XII re?ects this integration, FUR XII represents a key turning point in the FUR conference series.

It is to demonstrate the enormous potential of the experimental method in economics by providing examples of how experimental economics can shed important new light on key issues of vital economic significance. The subject matter covers several areas of economics and demonstrates why and how experimental methodology can provide new insight. It should prove invaluable to all economists, but perhaps particularly those who are as yet unexposed to this particular methodology. The most active experimental economists contributed to this volume: Besides the editor of this volume there are to mention P. Bohm, P. Burrows and G. Loomes, G.W. Harrison, S.S. Lim, E.C. Prescott and S. Sunder, A.E. Roth, P. Sbriglia.