I began developing and applying experimental economics methods to the study of behavior and market performance in the 1950s and 1960s and started teaching a graduate course in experimental economics in 1963; these early research exercises continued and occasionally started to include experiments that had economic design and “policy” applications in the 1960s. Thus, laboratory experiments in the 1960s examining rules for auctioning U.S. Treasury securities, in confluence with other forces, helped motivate a field experiment by Treasury in the 1970s, consisting of sixteen bond auctions, and this led to changes in policy in the 1980s and 1990s.

At the University of Arizona, along with several of my remarkable students and colleagues, we started to do electronic trading experiments – “E_Commerce” in the lab – in 1976 (Williams, 1980). Primarily these were exercises testing and exploring theoretical and other hypotheses about the performance of markets under controlled laboratory conditions. In the 1980s, these efforts grew naturally through our incremental learning into using experimental economics more systematically as a framework for communication and interaction with business, legal, engineering, regulatory, and other practitioners, in addition to students, and as a test bed for market designs that are applied in the world and used for postimplementation dialogue in ongoing rule evaluation.

All these laboratory experiences changed the way many of us thought about economic analysis and action, as experimental methods took on a life of their own – a fact that I had no conscious awareness of initially, as I was still thoroughly imbued with the prevailing orthodox way of economic thinking.