Kyu Sang Lee was first drawn to Duke University in the early 2000s by his interest in Vernon Smith. Kyu, then a PhD student at Notre Dame, was writing a dissertation on Smith’s experimental economics. He came to Duke to examine Smith’s papers, which are part of the Economists’ Papers Project.
Kyu, who is spending the academic year at the HOPE Center as a 2013–14 fellow, completed his dissertation in 2005. Titled “Rationality, Minds, and Machines in the Laboratory: A Thematic History of Vernon Smith’s Experimental Economics,” it won the History of Economics Society’s Joseph Dorfman Prize for best dissertation.
It was also in 2005 that Kyu returned to Duke to take part in that year’s HOPE conference, which was on demand theory. The paper he presented at the conference was on mechanism design theory and dealt in large part with the work of Stanley Reiter, one of the early innovators of mechanism design theory.
As it turned out, Kyu’s interest in mechanism design theory and its pioneer, Leonid Hurwicz, would bring him to Duke again. Hurwicz’s papers were donated to Duke in 2008, and just last year Kyu visited the campus to use the Hurwicz archives for a paper he is currently writing. The paper examines why some top economists (Hurwicz, Kenneth Arrow, and Oliver Williamson, to name only three) in the mid-1980s began to consider laboratory experimentation as not only relevant but essential to economic research. Its working hypothesis is that those elite members of the economics profession embraced laboratory experimentation because they were persuaded that it could help them not merely repair malfunctioning, preexisting markets (or organizations), but build new, “synthetic” markets (or organizations).
A professor in the Department of Economics at Ajou University in Suwon, South Korea, Kyu says that archival work can be frustrating, as the materials one finds can often refute or at least fail to support one’s working hypotheses.
“But the archival materials can give you a real feel for what someone was up to, what their real ambition or goal was, that doesn’t necessarily come through in the published works,” he says.
As an example, he cites a letter he came across from Vernon Smith to George Stigler. Stigler had published an article on the ideological influence of an economics education, arguing that an economics education makes people more conservative and “cautious.” Smith agreed, and in his letter he described how he went from being a socialist in high school to a free market advocate after he had completed his economics education.
“That conversion led Smith to want to know how markets really work, and that can explain a lot about Smith’s research agenda and his interest in experimentation,” Kyu explains.
A native of South Korea, Kyu is living in Chapel Hill for the year with his wife Youngmi, who is an analytical chemist, and his five-year-old son Joonhyung.
--Paul Dudenhefer