We are sad to announce the passing of John Kagel on January 6, 2026.

PJ Healy has written this tribute in John's memory:

John earned his PhD from Purdue in 1970, then worked at Texas A&M, University of Houston, University of Pittsburgh, and finally moved to Ohio State in 1999. John published some of the earliest work on experimental estimation of demand, including experiments varying prices and wages in token economies (which often involve incarcerated or institutionalized populations) and experiments on the consumption demand and labor supply of pigeons and rats, joint with Ray Battalio.

Since the mid-1980s, John worked with several coauthors on auction experiments, documenting bidder behavior in a variety of private-value settings and also being one of the first to experimentally identify the winner's curse in common-value auctions. This led to a lifelong collaboration with Dan Levin, among others.

John co-authored a series of papers with David Cooper on signaling games. This work involved trying to understand how play evolved with experience. As a way of gaining insight into the thought processes underlying learning, Cooper and Kagel began to study teams, using the dialogues between teammates as a window into the rationale underlying teams’ decisions. John went on to write numerous papers on teams with Cooper and others, pioneering the use of team dialogues as a valuable source of process data.

John also wrote a string of papers on coalitional bargaining with his student Guillaume Frechette.

John was an active member of the ESA from its earliest days, serving on the executive committee from 1986-1991 and then as the ESA president from 2005-2007.

John will be remembered not only for his wide-ranging and important contributions to the field of experimental economics, but also for his honest and direct approach to scholarship, his hearty laugh, and for the many students and young scholars he mentored. To those who didn't know John, he could seem forbidding. He was gruff and honest, although never mean-spirited. But for his students and mentees, John was incredibly warm and giving. He was willing to talk endlessly about experimental economics, his intellectual passion, but he was equally willing to talk about any problem we had, professional or personal. I did not always take John's advice, and that was invariably a mistake. John had a joy for life. He loved Harriette, his wife, and his daughters, Beth and Julie, fiercely. He loved good food, travel, and training his dogs. He was an extraordinary man, and the world is diminished by his passing.