Despite starting his academic journey later in life, Gary managed to publish around 100 papers between the ages of 50 and 70, establishing himself as one of the leading researchers in experimental economics.
In the span of 20 years, Charness pursued (among other activities) being a semi-professional poker player, an importer of textile art from Indonesia, an options trader on the Pacific Exchange, and a real-estate broker, investor, and lender.
In the fall of 1990, Charness read a newspaper article about a Stanford professor winning a Nobel Prize and knew one of the colleagues (Paul Milgrom) interviewed for the piece, as they were both students in the Honors Mathematics program at Michigan.
At Berkeley, Charness learned about experiments being used for research and saw this as an extension of poker playing, given the intuition he developed about people in these two decades in the real world.
He decided to pursue research in this area and conducted experiments at Berkeley and Tucson for his dissertation, under the tutelage of Matthew Rabin and George Akerlof.
Charness, Gary and Dan Levin (2005), “When Optimal Choices Feel Wrong: A Laboratory Study of Bayesian Updating, Complexity, and Affect,” American Economic Review, 95, 1300–1309.
Charness, Gary, Margarida Corominas-Bosch, and Guillaume Fréchette (2007), “Bargaining and Network Structure: An Experiment,” Journal of Economic Theory, 136, 28–65.
Charness, Gary, Luca Rigotti, and Aldo Rustichini (2007), “Individual Behavior and Group Membership,” American Economic Review, 97, 1340–1352.
Charness, Gary and Marie Claire Villeval (2009), “Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in the Field and the Laboratory,” American Economic Review, 99, 956–978.
Charness, Gary, Francesco Feri, Miguel Meléndez-Jiménez, and Matthias Sutter (2014), “Experimental Games on Networks: Underpinnings of Behavior and Equilibrium Selection,” Econometrica, 82, 1615–1670.
Brandts, Jordi, Gary Charness, and Matthew Ellman (2016), “Let’s Talk: How Communication Affects Contract Design,” Journal of the European Economic Association.
"[5] Charness and Gneezy make their case based on "The results of 15 different studies on risk-taking in investment, each of which gathered data by gender, and used the same very simple and easy-to-comprehend mechanism for eliciting risk preferences."