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Research in experimental economics has cogently challenged the fundamental precept of neoclassical economics that economic agents optimize. The last two decades have seen elaboration of boundedly rational models that try to move away from the optimization approach, in ways consistent with experimental findings. Nonetheless, the collection of alternative models has made little headway supplanting the dominant paradigm. We delineate key ways in which neoclassical microeconomics holds continuing and compelling advantages over bounded-rationality models, and suggest, via a few examples, the sorts of further, difficult pushes that would be needed to redress this state of affairs. Closer collaboration between theoretic modeling and experiments is clearly seen to be necessary.

In spring 2000, the British government auctioned off licences for Third Generation mobile telecommunications services. In the preparation of the auction, two designs involving each a hybrid of an English and a sealed-bid auction were considered by the government: A discriminatory and a uniform price variant. We report an experiment on these two designs, and also compare the results to those with a pure English auction. Both hybrids are similar in efficiency, revenue differences disappear as bidders get experienced. Compared to the discriminatory format, the pure English auction induces more entry. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ; We thank Sean Lyons for post-project support. ; Peer Reviewed

This book is concerned with the analysis, optimization and controllability of time-discrete dynamical systems and games under the aspect of stability, controllability and (for games) cooperative and non-cooperative treatment. The investigation of stability is based on Lyapunov's method which is generalized to non-autonomous systems. Optimization and controllability of dynamical systems is treated, among others, with the aid of mapping theorems such as implicit function theorem and inverse mapping theorem. Dynamical games are treated as cooperative and non-cooperative games and are used in order to deal with the problem of carbon dioxide reduction under economic aspects. The theoretical results are demonstrated by various applications