Goodbye Changchun

It is Saturday morning, 5:30 in the morning.  I managed to sleep until 4:30.  A new record.

C and me fly to Xi'an today.  It has been a very fruitful week in Changchun.  Three lectures in five days.  On Wednesday, I discussed the use of experiments in the economics classroom.  Yesterday, I discussed my paper on the anti-trust exemption in the Hawaiian airline industry to show the power of experiments in research.

Being an experimentalist has always allowed me the privilege of telling people something new and interesting.  But ignorance of the field is at an entirely different level here.  They know of Vernon Smith and so I am shamelessly name-dropping for the sake of legitimacy.  But I don't think the students and faculty are merely being polite when they say what a revelation it has been to see experiments at work.

On Wednesday, I had planned to run the smartphone double auction software, but after successfully testing it with the wifi network there, I decided the language difficulty with the client interface would make a mess of it.  The language proficiency if the students varied widely and I had visions of trade numbers far lower than the equilibrium.  By running the hand-run, I was able to have the payment sheets translated and use large teams as buyers and sellers with the thought that at least one person in the group would understand enough to make it work.  

I have never seen a double auction run like this one.  The students were so demure.  I spent a full few minutes coaxing the first bid.i usually have fight the students to keep quiet such that I can hear the bids and asks.  But when the students did finally warm up, the presented their bids and asks with great solemnity and only after standing.  

Meanwhile, I am doing my usual manic routine, urging them on.  It is safe to say they had not experienced anything like it before.

The results were some of the worst I had ever seen but it mattered little to the students.  They still flipped out when I explained how their induced values created supply and demand curves for the experimental good.  And they were absolutely engrossed in the dynamics of how their actual prices formed. 

And though I had explained carefully that some of the students would be paid their earnings, when it happened, the place went nuts.