The Laboratorio de Economía Experimental (LEE) at the University Jaume I of Castellón, Spain (officially founded: January 2003) is a local computer network of 2 servers and 66 PC’s installed in the first floor of the Research Building II of the University Jaume I.
Although the material resources of the LEE are exclusively dedicated to activities related to experimental research in economics, a very significant amount of our human resources are dedicated to totally different methodologies (mathematical economics, theoretical industrial organisation, environmental microeconomics, law and economics, etc.). In that sense, the LEE provides more than a space for running economic experiments: It is a point of intersection among as different areas of research as international economics, econometrics, finance, human resources, etc.
Despite its young age, the LEE hosts an active research group (16 full-time researchers, 11 associate/external researchers, and 4 pre-doctoral grantees), whose first experimental work goes back to the early 90’s.
In fact, the LEE is the end point of a long way (in space and time) starting with the first Turbo Pascal oligopoly experiments of learning by A. García-Gallego at the Econometrics Lab of the European University Institute in Florence (1991), revised and extended in sessions by A. García-Gallego and N. Georgantzís run at the LeeX (UPF, Barcelona, 1993-4), going through a huge number of classroom experiments (with paper, pencil, pen, slides, n-sided dies, balls, urns, chalk, blackboard and ... real tables) in Castellón and the unforgettable sessions (1999) of complex and less complex z-Tree markets at the LINEEX (University of Valencia), with whose board of directors we maintain far more than a simple neighbours’ friendship.
Along the –not always smooth– way to our current situation, many people have contributed with good will, wishes and actions. We mention some of our most active supporters in order of appearance: Alan Kirman, Stephen Martin, Antoni Bosch, Vicente Salas, Jordi Brandts, Amparo Urbano, Enrique Fatás, Tibor Neugebauer, Juan Andrés Bort, Robin Pope, Pedro Schwartz and Charles Noussair. We apologise to an unfairly long list of supporters who were omitted from the text but not from our memory.
Currently, the LEE holds the 2003 Prize: L@boratorio Interdisciplinar en Tecnologías de la Información awarded by Fundación DMR Consulting. In the same year, two of us joined the scientific committee of the Jornadas de Economía Industrial, which were jointly hosted by the LEE and the Economics department of the Universitat Jaume I. From 2002 to 2006, the LEE participated in the EU-funded project EPICURUS. Our experiments on Internet search engines have received financial support through one of the Summer 2004, 2005 and 2007 Grants of the NET Institute. We have received in 2006 the EVERIS prize to academic entrepreneurs. In 2010 the LEE changed location from the Faculty of Law and Economics to the new Research Building II, upgrading its servers and expanding its capacity from 36 to 66 clients. Becoming thus one of the largest Experimental Economics Labs in Europe.
