Michael Whinston | |
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Born | |
Nationality | American |
Academic career | |
Institution | MIT Northwestern University Harvard University |
Alma mater | MIT University of Pennsylvania |
Doctoral advisor | Franklin M. Fisher |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
Michael D. Whinston is an American economist and currently the Sloan Fellows Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously he was the Robert E. and Emily H. King Professor at Northwestern University and is also a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Econometric Society. [1] [2] Together with Andreu Mas-Colell and Jerry R. Green he authored the standard US graduate level microeconomics textbook: Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston and Jerry R. Green (1995) Microeconomic Theory, Oxford University Press
Whinston received a bachelors of science in economics and an MBA in finance from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. He then went on to receive a PhD in economics from MIT. [3]
Whinston is married to political theorist and Brown University professor Bonnie Honig. [4]
Frisch Medal: awarded the Frisch Medal in 2016 for a paper he co-authored with Ben Handel and Igal Handel titled “Equilibria in Health Exchanges: Adverse Selection Versus Reclassification Risk.” [5]
Distinguished Fellow: received the Industrial Organization Society Distinguished Fellow Award for his contributions and leadership in the field of Industrial Organization. [6]
Robert F. Lanzilliotti Prize: won the 2014 Robert F. Lanzilliotti Prize for his paper “Internal Vs. External Growth in Industries with Scale Economies: A Computational Model of Optimal Merger Policy,” co-authored with Ben Mermelstein, Volker Nocke, and Mark Satterthwaite. The award is given to the best paper in antitrust economics. [7]
Welfare economics is a field of economics that applies microeconomic techniques to evaluate the overall well-being (welfare) of a society.
In welfare economics, a social planner is a hypothetical decision-maker who attempts to maximize some notion of social welfare. The planner is a fictional entity who chooses allocations for every agent in the economy—for example, levels of consumption and leisure—that maximize a social welfare function subject to certain constraints. This so-called planner's problem is a mathematical constrained optimization problem. Solving the planner's problem for all possible Pareto weights yields all Pareto efficient allocations.
Andrew B. Whinston, is an American economist and computer scientist. He serves as the Hugh Roy Cullen Centennial Chair in Business Administration and works as a Professor of Information Systems, Computer Science, and Economics, and Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC) in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.
In economics, a budget set, or the opportunity set facing a consumer, is the set of all possible consumption bundles that the consumer can afford taking as given the prices of commodities available to the consumer and the consumer's income. Let the number of commodities available to the consumer in an economy be finite and equal to . Thus, for commodity amounts , also known as consumption plans which should not exceed the income, with associated prices and consumer income , the budget set is defined as
Hal Ronald Varian is Chief Economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information. Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics.
In economics, an agent's preferences are said to be weakly monotonic if, given a consumption bundle , the agent prefers all consumption bundles that have more of all goods. That is, implies . An agent's preferences are said to be strongly monotonic if, given a consumption bundle , the agent prefers all consumption bundles that have more of at least one good, and not less in any other good. That is, and imply .
In microeconomic theory, the marginal rate of technical substitution (MRTS)—or technical rate of substitution (TRS)—is the amount by which the quantity of one input has to be reduced when one extra unit of another input is used, so that output remains constant.
The law of supply is a fundamental principle of economic theory which states that, keeping other factors constant, an increase in sales price results in an increase in quantity supplied. In other words, there is a direct relationship between price and quantity: quantities respond in the same direction as price changes. This means that producers and manufacturers are willing to offer more of a product for sale on the market at higher prices, as increasing production is a way of increasing profits.
In economics, partial equilibrium is a condition of economic equilibrium which analyzes only a single market, ceteris paribus except for the one change at a time being analyzed. In general equilibrium analysis, on the other hand, the prices and quantities of all markets in the economy are considered simultaneously, including feedback effects from one to another, though the assumption of ceteris paribus is maintained with respect to such things as constancy of tastes and technology.
In economics, exponential discounting is a specific form of the discount function, used in the analysis of choice over time. Formally, exponential discounting occurs when total utility is given by
The MIT Department of Economics is a department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Frisch Medal is an award in economics given by the Econometric Society. It is awarded every two years for empirical or theoretical applied research published in Econometrica during the previous five years. The award was named in honor of Ragnar Frisch, first co-recipient of the Nobel prize in economics and editor of Econometrica from 1933 to 1954. In the opinion of Rich Jensen, Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics and chairperson of the Department of Economics of the University of Notre Dame, "The Frisch medal is not only one of the top three prizes in the field of economics, but also the most prestigious 'best article' award in the profession". Five Frisch medal winners have also won the Nobel Prize.
Sir Richard William Blundell CBE FBA is a British economist and econometrician.
Bonnie Honig, is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.
Franklin Marvin Fisher was an American economist. He taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 to 2004.
Andreu Mas-Colell is an economist, an expert in microeconomics and a prominent mathematical economist. He is the founder of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and a professor in the department of economics at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. He has also served several times in the cabinet of the Catalan government. Summarizing his and others' research in general equilibrium theory, his monograph gave a thorough exposition of research using differential topology. His textbook Microeconomic Theory, co-authored with Michael Whinston and Jerry Green, is the most used graduate microeconomics textbook in the world.
In economics, non-convexity refers to violations of the convexity assumptions of elementary economics. Basic economics textbooks concentrate on consumers with convex preferences and convex budget sets and on producers with convex production sets; for convex models, the predicted economic behavior is well understood. When convexity assumptions are violated, then many of the good properties of competitive markets need not hold: Thus, non-convexity is associated with market failures, where supply and demand differ or where market equilibria can be inefficient. Non-convex economies are studied with nonsmooth analysis, which is a generalization of convex analysis.
Convexity is a geometric property with a variety of applications in economics. Informally, an economic phenomenon is convex when "intermediates are better than extremes". For example, an economic agent with convex preferences prefers combinations of goods over having a lot of any one sort of good; this represents a kind of diminishing marginal utility of having more of the same good.
Jerry Richard Green is the John Leverett Professor in the University and the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. He is known for his research in economic theory, as well as writing the most commonly used microeconomic theory for graduate school with Andreu Mas-Colell and Michael Whinston, Microeconomic Theory.
Microeconomic Theory by Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston and Jerry R. Green is the standard US graduate level mainstream economics textbook. The book has 5 parts: Part I: Individual Decision-Making; Part II: Game Theory; Part III: Market Equilibrium and Market Failure; Part IV: General Equilibrium; Part V: Welfare Economics and Incentives individual decision theory. The book provides a rigorous (mathematical) and lengthy treatment of the standard microeconomic theorems and their ‘’proofs’’.