Invited speakers

Charles Plott

Charles Plott is currently Edward S. Harkness Professor of Economics and Political Science at the California Institute of Technology. Early in the 1970s Plott, began to explore the use of laboratory experimental methods. Since these early beginnings, the economics profession is experiencing an explosion of the application of laboratory experimental methods. Volumes of experimental papers are now being produced each year and the number of laboratories is rapidly growing. The Caltech laboratory that he developed is a major facility, which is serving as a model for laboratory development throughout the world.

Much of Professor Plott's research has been devoted to exploring how laboratory experimental methods might be applied to complex policy issues. In this capacity he has contributed to problems of allocating landing rights at the major airports. He was the first to apply modern laboratory methods to policy issues, including regulation, deregulation and anti-trust. More recently Professor Plott has been focused on two major issues. The first is the design of information aggregation mechanisms. These are mechanisms that depend upon the classical notion of rational expectations and are implemented for the purpose o f gathering useful information that is otherwise scattered across individuals in the form of intuitions and opinions. The second issue is the design of experimental tools to conduct large and world wide experiments. Already experiments that use people from around the world participating in a single market have been successfully conducted. This type of methodology promises to open new horizons to experimentalists.


Karin Knorr Cetina

Karin Knorr-Cetina is professor at the University of Konstanz, Germany, Visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Consultant to the Division of Science and Technology Policy of the UNESCO, Paris. Knorr Cetina was awarded the Ludwik Fleck Prize and the Robert K. Merton Professional Award for her groundbreaking study Epistemic Cultures by the Society of the Social Studies of Science and the American Sociological Association respectively.. The book compared two such cultures, in high energy physics and molecular biology and highlighted the diversity of these cultures of knowing and, in its depiction of their differences - in the meaning of the empirical, the enactment of object relations, and the fashioning of social relations - challenged the accepted view of unified science. With her book professor Knorr Cetina opened completely new ways in how sociologists studied the sciences. In her recent work on financial markets Knorr Cetina takes the sociologists' toolbox to the study of the heart of the economists' interests: the market. Who are the actors within them, how do they operate, within which networks, and how are these networks structured? Patterns of trading, trading room coordination, and global interaction are studied to help us better understand how markets work and the types of reasoning behind these trends.