Rate My Professor Thomas Palfrey

Palfrey's research centers on game theory and its applications to economics, political science, and political economy, integrating theoretical, experimental, and empirical approaches to examine strategic behavior under incomplete information. His work addresses elections, committee decision-making, auctions, bargaining, public finance, and mechanism design. With Richard McKelvey, he developed quantal response equilibrium, a model accounting for bounded rationality that has profoundly influenced analyses of political, economic, and social interactions. Prominent publications include Quantal Response Equilibrium: A Statistical Theory of Games (Princeton University Press, 2016, with J. Goeree and C. Holt), Bayesian Implementation (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993, with S. Srivastava), Experimental Foundations of Political Science (University of Michigan Press, 1993, with D. Kinder), and Laboratory Research in Political Economy (University of Michigan Press, 1991). He established Caltech's Social Science Experimental Laboratory (SSEL) in 1998 and directed it on three occasions (1998-2000, 2002-2004, 2009-2014), co-founded the California Social Science Experimental Laboratory (CASSEL) at UCLA, and founded the Princeton Laboratory for Experimental Social Science (PLESS). Among his honors are Fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), the Econometric Society (1995), the Game Theory Society (2017), Economic Theory Fellow of the Society for the Advancement in Economic Theory (2011), and the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science (2021).