The Economic Experience: An Introduction through Experiments

An innovative introduction to economic behavior that uses interactive experiments to promote experience-based discovery

This book presents a unique active-learning approach to economic thinking, providing a behavioral perspective on basic economic concepts ranging from trust to trade. Each chapter features a classroom experiment where students engage directly with the material as market participants, and chapters come with warm-up exercises, quizzes, and incisive summaries. The Economic Experience empowers students to develop insights into essential economic principles and goes beyond merely documenting behavioral anomalies by showing students how to navigate and anticipate them through hands-on learning and team building.

• Encourages discovery of key behavioral insights with interactive class simulations
• Provides a Socratic structure through lab reports for interpreting and applying lessons from experiment results while interacting with fellow students
• Includes “What Economists Do” sections that highlight key applications and policy issues
• Covers standard topics such as gains from trade, marginal analysis, and the resilience of competitive markets
• Enables students to experience the negative effects of market imperfections related to monopoly power, non-price rent seeking, corruption, congestion, and inadequate incentives for the provision of public goods
• Introduces notions of risk and strategic behavior in games and auctions
• Explains foundational macroeconomic concepts such as financial markets and the role of money while addressing behavioral issues like bank runs and asset market price bubbles that may arise in a macroeconomic setting
• Is supported by a free website that instructors can use to set up classroom experiments online

Charles A. Holt is the A. Willis Robertson Professor of Political Economy at the University of Virginia. His books include Experimental Economics (with Douglas D. Davis), Markets, Games, and Strategic Behavior, and Quantal Response Equilibrium (with Jacob K. Goeree and Thomas R. Palfrey) (all Princeton). Erica R. Sprott is a doctoral student at the Harvard Kennedy School and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.