When the editors of Experimental Economics received news of Amnon Rapoport's passing in 2022, we immediately thought it appropriate to honor his contributions to the community of experimental researchers in economics, psychology, and related disciplines with a special issue. Amnon's impacts in social science research are widespread and profound. They span a broad set of topics, largely under the theme of understanding human decision making in complex environments that are challenging to analyze theoretically and that require careful and thoughtful designs to investigate experimentally. He was a pioneer in using experimental methods to understand the world, and always had an open mind to novel questions and approaches.
We contacted people close to Amnon and who are also respected scholars in the experimental research community: David Budescu, Ido Erev, Tamar Kugler and Rami Zwick. They agreed to serve as guest editors for a special issue. Another person who knew Amnon well, Ramzi Suleiman, also initially agreed to be a guest editor but had to withdraw due to personal circumstances. On behalf of the editors of Experimental Economics, we greatly appreciate the work that all these people have put into the special issue.
After receiving many submissions, we were pleasantly surprised by the high number of strong papers that people had chosen to submit as a way of honoring and remembering Amnon's contributions and the impacts that these contributions had on their own research. Given that the resulting number of accepted papers is too large for a single issue, we decided to proceed with publication in two parts. This also coincided with the transition of Experimental Economics across publishers, making it possible to proceed to publication with the set of papers accepted as part of our agreement with the original publisher.
This volume contains the first nine papers accepted as part of the special issue.Footnote 1 A more detailed introduction, including discussion of the specific contributions of each paper and relationships to the work Amnon conducted, will be provided by the guest editors in Part 2 of the Special Issue in Honor of Amnon Rapoport. The two parts should be thought of as a collected set of works that honors Amnon's contributions and legacy, with the introduction to Part 2 serving as the primary introductory piece.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to share an experience with Amnon that has always stuck in my mind. In April of 1996, I participated in my first conference as a presenter, at the Public Choice / Economic Science Association meetings in Houston, Texas. I was nervous about presenting in front of a variety of experienced researchers, and I tried to get through the talk as well as possible. As I took a seat after my talk, Amnon, who was sitting nearby, handed me a handwritten note on a small piece of paper. It told me I had done a good job presenting and offered me some suggestions for improving the work. The kindness that someone so accomplished offered to an unknown PhD student is reflective of the way Amnon conducted himself more generally. I had several subsequent opportunities to interact with Amnon and, in every case, I was struck by his class and humility, as much as by his intellect and knowledge.
