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The paper investigates the convergence of the h-, p- and hp-versions of a variational symmetric boundary element method (BEM) in plane elasticity by numerical experiments. The study discusses mixed boundary value problems on polygonal domains, i.e. problems for which the exact solution is analytic except in a finite number of points. The convergence of the error in energy norm is displayed for all versions of the BEM. All results are also compared with those obtained by the corresponding finite element methods. The theoretically predicted asymptotic convergence rates for all versions of the method can be observed in the numerical experiments. A comparison of computer times is given as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]