Dr. Smith has authored or co-authored more than 375 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics and experimental economics. He serves or has served on the board of editors of the American Economic Review, The Cato Journal, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Science, Economic Theory, Economic Design, Games and Economic Behavior, and the Journal of Economic Methodology. He is past-president of the Public Choice Society, the Economic Science Association, the Western Economic Association and the Association for Private Enterprise Education. Previous faculty appointments include the University of Arizona, Purdue University, Brown University, the University of Massachusetts, and George Mason University, where he was a professor of economics and law prior to joining the faculty at Chapman University. Dr. Smith has been a Ford Foundation Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology.
In 1991, the Cambridge University Press published Dr. Smith's Papers in Experimental Economics, and in 2000, a second collection of more recent papers, Bargaining and Market Behavior. Cambridge published his Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms in January 2008. Cambridge published his Humanomics, coauthored with Bart Wilson in 2019. Palgrave MacMillan published Economics of Markets coauthored with Sabiou Inoua in 2022 and his Adam Smith’s Theory of Society in 2025.
Smith has received an honorary Doctor of Management degree from Purdue University, and is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Smith is a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association, an Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year, and the 1995 Adam Smith Award recipient conferred by the Association for Private Enterprise Education. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1995, and received CalTech's distinguished alumni award in 1996. He has served as a consultant on the privatization of electric power in Australia and New Zealand and participated in numerous private and public discussions of energy deregulation in the United States. In 1997 he served as a Blue Ribbon Panel Member, National Electric Reliability Council.
Dr. Smith completed his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, his master's degree in economics at the University of Kansas, and his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University.
Courses Taught:
Spontaneous Order and the Law
Recent Creative, Scholarly Work and Publications:
Adam Smith’s Theory of Society. Social Rules for Order in Society and Economy. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature, 2025.
The Economic Function of Inflation Is to Lower the Real Value of Wealth Assets Sufficiently to Pay for the Government’s Excess Spending Monetized by the Federal Reserve, By Vernon L. Smith This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of The Independent Review
2023 “A Classical Model of Speculative Asset Price Dynamics,” (With S.M. Inoua). Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance (refereed by 500+ reviewers for the “Nobel and Novice” experiment; formerly, “Re-tradable Assets, Speculation, and Economic Instability), 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2022.100780
With Sabiou Inoua Economics of Markets. Neoclassical Theory, Experiments, and Theory of Classical Price Discovery. Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature, 2022.
Discussion with Vernon Smith
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/324078/1/1839503513.pdf
Classical Economics Lost and Found By Vernon L. Smith, Sabiou M. Inoua
This article appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of The Independent Review.
Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson (2019) Humanomics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Faith, science and religion,” appeared in Eminent Economists II – Their Life and Work Philosophies. (Eds. M. Szenberg and L. Ramrattan). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
