Research Programs In 1988 Kevin McCabe, Stephen Rassenti, and Vernon Smith teamed up to study call auctions as applied to simple, composite, and 'smart' markets. This led to an understading that market institutions provide participants with a centralized computation based on decentralized information and that well designed auctions give participants an incentive to provide sufficiently reliable information about their private values and costs to facilitate such a computation. This research continues at ICES where we produce 'smart' markets for an increasingly complex world, and at CSN where we study how institutions serve as extensions of our minds.
In 1993 a second research program was started to examine personal exchange between bilateral partners. John Dickhaut, Elizabeth Hoffman, Kevin McCabe, and Vernon Smith teamed up to do this research. This led to an understanding that people have an evolved capacity for reciprocal exchange. This research continues to examine how these evolved capacities would operate in different economic contexts.
In 1998 a third research program was started to examine how brain activity could lead to an emergent mind that could engage in personal exchange and build social tools in order to reduce uncertainty and expand its economic activity. John Dickhaut, Daniel Houser, Kevin McCabe, and Vernon Smith teamed up to do this research. This led to an understanding that a cognitive strategy is prodcued by patterns of neural activity that are common accross individulas, but within a given context individuals may follow a number of different cognitive strategies, and follow up research continues to examine how these different strategies get selected in different minds.
In 2003 a fourth research program was started to examine how social tools are instantiated in institutions. Terrence Chorvat, Daniel Houser, Kevin McCabe, Douglass North, and Vernon Smith have teamed up to do this research. The goal is to study the dyanamics of the rules of use that surround an organizations use of social tools, and current research examines how the mind extends its social and cogntive scope through its use of economic, legal, and political tools as imbeded in our social institutions. |