Vernon Smith, who Wednesday was named a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, has been instrumental in establishing experimentation as a tool in economic analysis. His experiments began soon after he started teaching economics at Purdue University in 1955.

“It took me several years to realize that the textbooks were wrong and the people in my class were correct,” Smith said Wednesday.

The Kansas University graduate said economists at first didn’t understand why he was conducting experiments. “Economists don’t do experiments. This one does,” he said, referring to himself.

Smith said he planned to give his prize money to the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics, which he founded in 1997.