European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, April 2025
Competition, experiments and price theory. On a controversial return to the classical economists
by Emiliano Brancaccio and Paolo Trabucchi

The paper discusses the call by Sabiou Inoua and Nobel laureate Vernon Smith for a return to Adam Smith based on what “experimental economics” would have in common with the approach of the classical economists. The aim of the two authors is to provide an alternative to the neoclassical approach, both as a general theory of prices and, more specifically, as an account of the working of competition. Such an authoritative call for a theoretical breakthrough is undoubtedly welcome news to all advocates of a comparative approach among alternative research programmes in economic theory. We argue, however, that Inoua and Smith fail in their aim, showing in particular that the major shortcomings of their approach ultimately derive from the rejection of Adam Smith’s distinction between “market prices” and “natural prices.”
This paper is inspired by a discussion of one of the authors with Vernon Smith in the DySES conference, NEOMA Business School, Rouen, France, on 5 October 2022 (Brancaccio 2023) and a subsequent exchange of correspondence with Sabiou Inoua and Vernon Smith. We are grateful to Sabiou Inoua, Vernon Smith and all the workshop participants at the DySES conference for all their helpful comments. We also thank two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments. The usual disclaimers apply.
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