Last week, I had the pleasure of grabbing lunch with Vernon Smith and Alois Stutzer and having a very interesting conversation about the (joint) history of our fields, Economics and Psychology. I was particularly interested in learning whether Vernon felt his experimental work had been significantly influenced by Psychology and its penchant for experimentation – after all, experimental psychology started in the 19th century, taking behavioural economics another 80 or so years to discover the power of experimentation! Vernon said that his initial experiments originated independently of any knowledge of psychologists’ work but that it was later deeply influenced by one – Sidney Siegel. I was a little shocked that I didn’t know about Siegel so I tried to find out more about him and his work. It turns out that Siegel can be thought as one of the first economic psychologists (or experimental/behavioral economists), because he conducted some of the first well-controlled experiments on economic decision making (in the 1950s, Siegel worked with philosophers, Donald Davidson and Patrick Suppes, to estimate utility functions from choice experiments). For those of you interested in this field, you can find below a paper that nicely describes Siegel’s life and contributions.

Innocenti, A. (2010). How a psychologist informed economics: The case of Sidney Siegel. Journal of Economic Psychology, 31(3), 421–434. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2010.01.010