Soon after I came to the University of Arizona in 1975,1 became involved in joint work with several undergraduate and graduate students in the development of interactive software programs that would enable experimental subjects to trade via computer terminals under the rules of alternative exchange institutions. The computer brought a new dimension to experimental economics. This period also initiated my longtime collaboration with Arlington W. Williams, first as a graduate student at the University of Arizona, then as a member of the faculty at Indiana University. Williams has been instrumental in bringing the “machine age” to economic experimentation in the form of a staggering volume of software development and refinement.

With these new tools we undertook a number of studies of comparative institutional performance. We systematically examined the effect of nonbinding price controls under computerized double auction trading rules (paper 10). This work had been motivated by the original discovery by R. Mark Isaac and Charles Plott of the nonbenign dynamic effect of price controls, including nonbinding controls, on convergence to competitive equilibria — a result that was not anticipated by static theory. Williams and I executed a design based on a systematic replication of these unexpected results and measured the quantitative effect of nonbinding controls on price outcomes within this design.