Roger Myerson | |
---|---|
![]() Myerson in 2008 | |
Born | Boston, Massachusetts, US | March 29, 1951
Academic career | |
Field | Game theory |
Institution | University of Chicago Northwestern University |
Alma mater | Harvard University (AB, SM, PhD) |
Doctoral advisor | Kenneth Arrow |
Doctoral students | Scott E. Page Leonard Wantchekon |
Contributions | Mechanism design |
Awards | Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2007) |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc | |
Academic background | |
Thesis | A theory of cooperative games (1976) |
Roger Bruce Myerson (born March 29, 1951) is an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago. He holds the title of the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts in the Harris School of Public Policy, the Griffin Department of Economics, and the college. [1] Previously, he held the title The Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics. [2] In 2007, he was the winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for "having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." [3] He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. [4]
Roger Myerson was born in 1951 in Boston into a Jewish [5] family. He attended Harvard University, where he received his A.B., summa cum laude , and S.M. in applied mathematics in 1973. He completed his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1976. [6] His doctorate thesis was A Theory of Cooperative Games. [7]
From 1976 to 2001, Myerson was a professor of economics at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, where he conducted much of his Nobel-winning research. [8] From 1978 to 1979, he was visiting researcher at Bielefeld University. He was visiting professor of economics at the University of Chicago from 1985 to 1986 and from 2000 to 2001. He became professor of economics at Chicago in 2001. Currently, he is the inaugural David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago. [9]
Myerson was one of the three winners of the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the other two being Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota, and Eric Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study. He was awarded the prize for his contributions to mechanism design theory. [10]
Myerson made a path-breaking contribution to mechanism design theory when he discovered a fundamental connection between the allocation to be implemented and the monetary transfers needed to induce informed agents to reveal their information truthfully. Mechanism design theory allows for people to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not. The theory has helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes, and voting procedures. Today, the theory plays a central role in many areas of economics and parts of political science. [10]
Myerson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Philosophical Society. [7] He is a Fellow of the Game Theory Society [11] and serves as an advisory board member on the International Journal of Game Theory. [12] Myerson holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel in 2002 [13] and received the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2009. [14] He also served on the Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2016.
In 1980, Myerson married Regina (née Weber) and the couple had two children, Daniel and Rebecca. [15] His daughter, Rebecca, is a health economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. [16]
He wrote a general textbook on game theory in 1991, and has also written on the history of game theory, including his review of the origins and significance of noncooperative game theory. [17] He also served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Game Theory for ten years.
Myerson has worked on economic analysis of political institutions and written several major survey papers:
His recent work on democratization has raised critical questions about American policy in occupied Iraq:
Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch was an influential Norwegian economist known for being one of the major contributors to establishing economics as a quantitative and statistically informed science in the early 20th century. He coined the term econometrics in 1926 for utilising statistical methods to describe economic systems, as well as the terms microeconomics and macroeconomics in 1933, for describing individual and aggregate economic systems, respectively. He was the first to develop a statistically informed model of business cycles in 1933. Later work on the model, together with Jan Tinbergen, won the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969.
Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. Along with John Hicks, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972.
Gérard Debreu was a French-born economist and mathematician. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Hirofumi Uzawa was a Japanese economist.
Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Lionel Wilfred McKenzie was an American economist. He was the Wilson Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Rochester. He was born in Montezuma, Georgia. He completed undergraduate studies at Duke University in 1939 and subsequently moved to Oxford that year as a Rhodes Scholar. McKenzie worked with the Cowles Commission while it was in Chicago and served as an assistant professor at Duke from 1948 to 1957. Having received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1956, McKenzie moved to Rochester where he was responsible for the establishment of the graduate program in economics.
Auction theory is a branch of applied economics that deals with how bidders act in auctions and researches how the features of auctions incentivise predictable outcomes. Auction theory is a tool used to inform the design of real-world auctions. Sellers use auction theory to raise higher revenues while allowing buyers to procure at a lower cost. The confluence of the price between the buyer and seller is an economic equilibrium. Auction theorists design rules for auctions to address issues that can lead to market failure. The design of these rulesets encourages optimal bidding strategies in a variety of informational settings. The 2020 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats."
Leonid Hurwicz was a Polish–American economist and mathematician, known for his work in game theory and mechanism design. He originated the concept of incentive compatibility, and showed how desired outcomes can be achieved by using incentive compatible mechanism design. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work on mechanism design. Hurwicz was one of the oldest Nobel Laureates, having received the prize at the age of 90.
Eric Stark Maskin is an American economist and mathematician. He was jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". He is the Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University.
Henry Schultz was an American economist, statistician, and one of the founders of econometrics. Paul Samuelson named Schultz as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860.
Robert Butler "Bob" Wilson, Jr. is an American economist and the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at Stanford University. He was jointly awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with his Stanford colleague and former student Paul R. Milgrom, "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats". Two more of his students, Alvin E. Roth and Bengt Holmström, are also Nobel Laureates in their own right.
Alvin Eliot Roth is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2017.
Designing Economic Mechanisms is a 2006 book by economists Leonid Hurwicz and Stanley Reiter. Hurwicz received the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for their work on mechanism design. In this book, Hurwicz and Reiter presented systematic methods for designing decentralized economic mechanisms whose performance attains specified goals.
Stanley Reiter was an American author, economist, and Emeritus Professor at Northwestern University. Reiter was a leading pioneer in the field of mechanism design.
Arunava Sen is a professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute. He works on Game Theory, Social Choice Theory, Mechanism Design, Voting and Auctions.
The Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute was launched in 2010 in order to promote socioeconomic research.
The Journal of Mathematical Economics is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal of mathematical economics published by Elsevier. It covers work in economic theory that expresses economic ideas using formal mathematical reasoning. The journal was established in 1974, with Werner Hildenbrand as the founding editor-in-chief. The current editor-in-chief is Andres Carvajal. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2018 5-year impact factor of 0.725.
Hervé Moulin is a French mathematician who is the Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. He is known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division. He has written five books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles.
Vladimir Nikolaevich Burkov is a Russian control theorist and the author of more than four hundred publications on control problems, game theory, and combinatorial optimization. Laureate of State Prize of USSR, of Prize of Cabinet Council of USSR, he is an Honoured Scholar of the Russian Federation. Vladimir Burkov is a vice-president of Russian Project Management Association (SOVNET), Member of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. A professor at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Head of Laboratory at V.A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of RAS, in the end of the 1960s he pioneered the theory of active systems.
Benny Moldovanu is a German economist who currently holds the Chair of Economic Theory II at the University of Bonn. His research focuses on applied game theory, auction theory, mechanism design, contests and matching theory, and voting theory. In 2004, Moldovanu was awarded the Gossen Prize for his contributions to auction theory and mechanism design.