Here's the memorial page from the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
HT: Vijay Vazirani
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Earlier:
Showing posts with label RIP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RIP. Show all posts
Sunday, August 4, 2024
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Danny Kahneman, remembered by Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Daniel Kahneman, 1934-2024: Nobel Prize Winner & CASBS Legend
"Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, and among the most distinguished and consequential cognitive and behavioral scientists of the past half-century, passed away on March 27, 2024. He was 90.
"Daniel Kahneman was a CASBS fellow during the 1977-78 academic year, occupying office (called “studies” at CASBS) #6. (Notably, this remarkable class included two other future Nobel Prize winners – Oliver Williamson (2009) and Robert B. Wilson (2020) – as well as future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
"Kahneman’s 1977-78 year is legendary for two reasons. First, it is here, at CASBS, where Kahneman and his principal collaborator of nearly a decade, Amos Tversky – who had a visiting appointment at Stanford University’s psychology department that year[1] – completed a paper they painstakingly had been working on for years: “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” The paper, published in March 1979 in the journal Econometrica, is a landmark in the annals of the social sciences. The paper presents a direct challenge to standard expected utility theory through the concept of loss aversion, describing how economic agents assess prospective losses and gains in an asymmetric manner. In other words, people frame transactions or outcomes in their minds subjectively, affecting the value (or utility) they expect to receive.
...
"Though Kahneman himself had expressed it in various ways over the years, he put it crisply in 2016:
"CASBS is where behavioral economics took shape. When Richard Thaler heard that Amos Tversky and I would be in Stanford, he finagled a visiting appointment down the hill to spend time with us. We spent a lot of time walking around the Center and became lifelong friends. Those long conversations that Dick had with Amos and me helped him construct his then heretical (and now well-established) view of economics, by using psychological observations to explain violations of standard economic theory.[5]
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Earlier:
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Thursday, July 4, 2024
YingHua He 何 英华 has died.
Yan Chen passes on the devastating news that YingHua He 何 英华 passed away on Tuesday night, after struggling with kidney cancer.
May his memory be a blessing.
He graduated from college in China in 2001, got an MA at Peking University, received his Ph.D. at Columbia in 2011, taught in Toulouse, and was an associate professor at Rice University when he died.
Here's his CV, and here is his Google Scholar page. He did important work on market design, including on school choice and kidney exchange.
He was one of the pioneers of empirical market design, combining econometrics with matching theory.
He had many friends, and I was lucky to be among them. Here's a photo I took of him giving a seminar at Stanford, when he was a visiting scholar in 2014-15
 |
| Yinghua He at Stanford, January 2015 |
Here are some of my blog posts on his work:
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Multiple offer mechanisms in school choice, when information gathering is costly
Sunday, November 6, 2022
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Frans de Waal (1948-2024)
The eminent primatologist Frans de Waal has passed away. Here's a memoriam from Emory University:
Emory primatologist Frans de Waal remembered for bringing apes ‘a little closer to humans’
I sometimes show the video below about his experiment with monkeys on fairness (and being treated unfairly) to my class on experimental economics (typically when I'm about to talk about the ultimatum game).
"Two capuchins were situated in enclosures next to one another. A researcher would ask them to do a task and if they succeeded give them a treat. The catch was one monkey was always rewarded with a piece of cucumber while the other monkey sometimes got a piece of cucumber and sometimes got a grape — a preferred treat among capuchin monkeys.
"A video de Waal filmed of one of the experiments created a media sensation.
Unequal pay for equal work: When the first monkey gives the researcher a rock, she is rewarded with a cucumber slice. But watch what happens when the first monkey sees the second monkey hand the researcher a rock — and get a much tastier grape instead.
"A monkey that received only cucumber appears perfectly happy until she sees her companion receive a grape. Then her behavior changes. She accepts the next piece of cucumber only to throw it back at the researcher, pounding the surface in front of the enclosure and shaking its Plexiglas walls.
“That video struck home with a lot of people,” Brosnan says. “Who hasn’t felt like that monkey that’s only getting cucumbers? Our research showed something about the evolution of the sense of human fairness.”
Sunday, May 12, 2024
Richard Slayman: first recipient of pig kidney transplant dies after two months. (RIP)
Here's the story from the Guardian:
Pig kidney ‘xenotransplant’ patient dies two months later. No indication that Richard ‘Rick’ Slayman’s receipt of genetically modified kidney caused his death, says Massachusetts transplant team
"The first recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney transplant has died about two months later, with the hospital that performed the surgery saying it did not have any indication the transplant was the cause.
...
"In a statement, Slayman’s family thanked his doctors. “Their enormous efforts leading the xenotransplant gave our family seven more weeks with Rick, and our memories made during that time will remain in our minds and hearts,” the statement said.
"They said Slayman underwent the surgery in part to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive. “Rick accomplished that goal and his hope and optimism will endure forever.”
"In April, New Jersey woman Lisa Pisano also received a genetically modified pig kidney as well as a mechanical pump to keep her heart beating.
########
I'm not aware of any medical journal reports so far on these transplants--reporting has just been by press release...
Saturday, May 11, 2024
Jim Simons (1938-2024)
Jim Simons, the great investor and philanthropist of math and computer science, died yesterday.
Here's the announcement from the Simons Foundation.
Simons Foundation Co-Founder, Mathematician and Investor Jim Simons Dies at 86
And here's the NYT:
Jim Simons, Math Genius Who Conquered Wall Street, Dies at 86. Using advanced computers, he went from M.I.T. professor to multibillionaire. His Medallion fund had 66 percent average annual returns for decades.
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Danny Kahneman (1934-2024)
Danny Kahneman passed away today.
Here's the Washington Post obituary:
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-winning economist, dies at 90. He found that people rely on shortcuts that often lead them to make wrongheaded decisions that go against their own best interest By Chris Powe
"Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and best-selling author whose Nobel Prize-winning research upended economics — as well as fields ranging from sports to public health — by demonstrating the extent to which people abandon logic and leap to conclusions, died March 27. He was 90.
"His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor for the New Yorker. She did not say where or how he died.
...
"Dr. Kahneman took a dim view of people’s ability to think their way through a problem. “Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions,” he wrote in his popular 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” “They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.”
"Dr. Kahneman spent much of his career working alongside psychologist Amos Tversky, who he said deserved much of the credit for their prizewinning work. But Tversky died in 1996, and the Nobel is never awarded posthumously.
"Both men were atheist grandsons of Lithuanian rabbis, and both had studied and lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their three-decade friendship and close collaboration, chronicled in Michael Lewis’s 2016 book “The Undoing Project,” was a study in opposites.
"According to Lewis, Tversky was the life of the party; Dr. Kahneman never even went. Tversky had a mechanical pencil on his desk and nothing else; Dr. Kahneman’s office was full of books and articles he never finished. Still, Dr. Kahneman said, at times it was as if “we were sharing a mind.” They worked so closely together that they tossed a coin to decide whose name would go first on an article or a book.
"Their research helped establish the field of behavioral economics, which applies psychological insights to the study of economic decision-making, but also had a far-reaching effect outside the academy. "
Friday, March 8, 2024
Dr. Guy Alexandre (1934-2024), gave birth to brain death in deceased organ transplantation
The father of brain death has died.
Here's the NYT obit.
Guy Alexandre, Transplant Surgeon Who Redefined Death, Dies at 89. His willingness to remove kidneys from brain-dead patients increased the organs’ viability while challenging the line between living and dead. By Clay Risen
"Guy Alexandre, a Belgian transplant surgeon who in the 1960s risked professional censure by removing kidneys from brain-dead patients whose hearts were still beating — a procedure that greatly improved organ viability while challenging the medical definition of death itself — died on Feb. 14 at his home in Brussels. He was 89.
...
"Dr. Alexandre was just 29 and fresh off a yearlong fellowship at Harvard Medical School when, in June 1963, a young patient was wheeled into the hospital where he worked in Louvain, Belgium. She had sustained a traumatic head injury in a traffic accident, and despite extensive neurosurgery, doctors pronounced her brain dead, though her heart continued to beat.
"He knew that in another part of the hospital, a patient was suffering from renal failure. He had assisted on kidney transplants at Harvard, and he understood that the organs began to lose viability soon after the heart stops beating.
"Dr. Alexandre pulled the chief surgeon, Jean Morelle, aside and made his case. Brain death, he said, is death. Machines can keep a heart beating for a long time with no hope of reviving a patient. His argument went against centuries of assumptions about the line between life and death, but Dr. Morelle was persuaded.
...
"Over the next two years, Dr. Alexandre and Dr. Morelle quietly performed several more kidney transplants using the same procedure. Finally, at a medical conference in London in 1965, Dr. Alexandre announced what he had been doing.
...
"In 1968, the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee, a group of medical experts, largely adopted Dr. Alexandre’s criteria when it declared that an irreversible coma should be understood as the equivalent of death, whether the heart continues to beat or not.
"Today, Dr. Alexandre’s perspective is widely shared in the medical community, and removing organs from brain-dead patients has become an accepted practice.
“The greatness of Alexandre’s insight was that he was able to see the insignificance of the beating heart,” Robert Berman, an organ-donation activist and journalist, wrote in Tablet magazine in 2019.
###########
And here's the story from Tablet magazine, interesting in a number of respects:
The Man Who Remade Death. Guy Alexandre was the first surgeon to remove organs from a patient with a beating heart. His colleagues thought him a murderer; Alexandre disagreed and revolutionized our understanding of death. BY ROBBY BERMAN, Feb 4, 2019
"I met Alexandre a few months ago in his home in an upscale suburb of Brussels. The octogenarian is charming, affable and avuncular but he does not mince words: The physicians who accused him of murder “were hypocrites. They viewed their brain dead patients as alive yet they had no qualms about turning off the ventilator to get the heart to stop beating before they removed kidneys. In addition to ‘killing’ the patient, they were giving the recipients damaged kidneys that suffered ischemia … oxygen deprivation. The kidneys did not work well; they did not last long.”
"Given that brain death was not well known by the public in 1963, I asked Alexandre how he succeeded in getting consent from families to donate the organs. “It was simple. I didn’t ask. I told the families the situation was grim and I removed the organs in the middle of the night. When the family returned the next morning I told them their loved one had died during the night.”
"In 1961, Alexandre was in his third year of surgical training. He left Brussels for Boston to attend Harvard Medical School where he studied under professor Joseph Murray, the surgeon famous for performing the first successful kidney transplant between twins in 1954. After Alexandre successfully executed a number of kidney transplants between dogs in the laboratory, he was invited by Murray to join him in the operating room to operate on humans. It was there that Alexandre noticed a curious phenomenon.
"Murray turned off the ventilator in order to cause the heart to stop beating and only then did he extract the organs. Alexandre felt there was no need to damage the kidneys by depriving them of oxygen. He believed when looking at a human body with a dead brain that he was looking at a corpse that was suffering from a bizarre medical condition: a beating heart. In other words, the organism was dead but the organs remained alive."
Sunday, December 31, 2023
The year in passings
Another year, more memories and memorials:
Sunday, January 29, 2023
Paul David (1935-2023)
Monday, January 30, 2023
Tonya Ingram (1991-2022), health activist, died while waiting for a kidney
Monday, March 20, 2023
Victor Elias (1937-2023)
Thursday, June 22, 2023
Leo Hurwicz (1917-2008), biography
Monday, June 26, 2023
Harry Markowitz (1927-2023)
Friday, June 30, 2023
Lloyd Shapley (1923-2016) Centennial
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Friday, December 15, 2023
Who Shall Live? (3rd edition) by Victor R. Fuchs and Karen Eggleston
Shortly before he passed away in September at the age of 99, Vic Fuchs finished the third edition of his book Who Shall Live?, now with a coauthor, Karen Eggleston.
It just came out now, in time for his 100th birthday next month.
********
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Saturday, November 25, 2023
Memorial service for Vic Fuchs
Yesterday, at Etz Chayim Synagogue, Palo Alto.
Here is my brief eulogy:
Vic was the patriarch of a clan, and a man of wide and old friendships. He was, by the way, also a brilliant, erudite, compassionate economist.
Emilie and I were among his new friends. In 2013 we bought a house down the hill from Vic, and held an open house; he came over, carrying his own chair-back, and was the life of the party. In those days he used to reply to questions about how he was doing with a joke: “I’m in perfect health—my psychiatrist says it’s all in my body.”
That joke got less funny as his body continued to betray him, and after a while he stopped telling it.
When he joined us for dinner, he and Emilie would negotiate the menu. (He was a fussy eater, who liked his food very plain).
In 2016, when Vic joined us to watch one of the debates among Democratic primary candidates for president, he couldn’t contain himself when they discussed health care, and I gave him a lift home before the debate concluded, so he could write an op-ed. He was still in the game.
During Covid, he stopped leaving his house except to go to the doctor. As his mobility declined, our visits migrated from his patio, to the downstairs living room, and eventually up the half flight of stairs to his office.
Vic’s mind remained sharp. We were able to visit him until about a month before he passed away. He was worried about the world, but still eager to hear jokes, and to tell them.
He was a role model, and a pleasure to spend time with.
Vic was a man of many parts, and his life was full of accomplishments, admirers, family and friends for whom his memory will be a blessing.
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Vic Fuchs (1924-2023)
My friend and neighbor Vic Fuchs, the dean of American health economists, passed away on Friday.
He was just a few months short of 100, but in the last year he finished revising the third edition of his 1975 book, Who Shall Live? Health, Economics, and Social Choice.
He bravely bore some physical ailments, but his mind remained sharp, and he was always a pleasure to talk to. (He used to joke "I'm in perfect health: my psychiatrist says its all in my body.")
He kept abreast of current events, and remained informed and concerned about the state of the health care system in the U.S., and democracy.
 |
| Vic Fuchs speaking at the memorial conference for Ken Arrow, Oct. 9, 2017 |
##########
Update: here's a Stanford obit:
Fuchs’ influence and tireless devotion to the field of health care economics and the Stanford community spanned decades.
September 18, 2023 | Krysten Crawford
Friday, June 30, 2023
Lloyd Shapley (1923-2016) Centennial
Lloyd Harlow Shapley was born in 1923: he would be (and I guess is) 100 years old this year. His family is assembling a website honoring his centennial. (It's part of a family of web pages devoted to the life and work of Lloyd's dad, the astronomer Harlow Shapley.)
Here's the page for the Lloyd Shapley Centennial
It appears to be a work in progress, with many links. It begins this way:
"Lloyd Shapley (1923-2016) was a Nobel prizewinning mathematician. Shapley’s "intellectual life and career ... was among the most fertile of the 20th century." For the Centennial of Lloyd’s birth the Harlow Shapley Project offers this easy-access guide to Lloyd's WORK, his favorite GAME Kriegspiel, personal STORIES not published before and his four PRIZES.
"Lloyd Shapley was one of the founding giants of game theory. He shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics for his seminal work with the late David Gale on stable matching – situations in which there are no two agents who would prefer one another over their current counterparts. But "he could have won a Nobel for any of a number of his papers that initiated whole literatures,” wrote Alvin E. Roth, Lloyd’s Nobel co-winner (right).
"Mathematical giant John von Neumann (right) invited Lloyd to leave RAND for Princeton on the basis of a two-page paper Lloyd sent him. After getting his Princeton PhD Lloyd returned to RAND full-time. He was a very productive member of the fabled Mathematics Division. Lloyd was almost unbeatable in the Division’s lunchtime Kriegspiel matches.
"The Work page has summaries of Lloyd’s main contributions prepared by Dr. Bruce E. Krell, a game theorist who was a colleague of Lloyd’s at RAND. The Work page also offers a bibliography of selected descriptions of his work. The Work includes the 1962 “marriage problem” paper with David Gale (right), which won the Nobel."
Monday, June 26, 2023
Harry Markowitz (1927-2023)
Harry Markowitz, who invented modern portfolio theory, and did much beside, has died.
Here's his NYT obituary, which was apparently prepared long in advance.
Harry Markowitz, Nobel-Winning Pioneer of Modern Portfolio Theory, Dies at 95. He overturned the traditional approach to buying stocks by examining the relationship between risk and reward. By Robert D. Hershey Jr.
“I’m not a one-shot Nobel laureate — only doing one thing,” Dr. Markowitz said in an interview for this obituary in 2014. Although he was 87 at the time, he was embarked on a monumental analysis of securities risk and return."
********
PORTFOLIO SELECTION, by Harry Markowitz, The Journal of Finance Volume 7, Issue 1 p. 77-91 First published: March 1952 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1952.tb01525.x
*******
Here's the beginning of the 1990 Nobel Prize press release:
16 October 1990
THIS YEAR’S LAUREATES ARE PIONEERS IN THE THEORY OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS AND CORPORATE FINANCE
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1990 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with one third each, to
Professor Harry Markowitz, City University of New York, USA,
Professor Merton Miller, University of Chicago, USA,
Professor William Sharpe, Stanford University, USA,
for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics.
Harry Markowitz is awarded the Prize for having developed the theory of portfolio choice;
William Sharpe, for his contributions to the theory of price formation for financial assets, the so-called, Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM); and
Merton Miller, for his fundamental contributions to the theory of corporate finance.
********
Here's the citation for the 1989 von Neumann theory prize in operations research:
"1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize:
"Harry M. Markowitz received the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize. Dr. Markowitz, presenter Ellis Johnson noted, contributed ground-breaking work in three areas: portfolio selection, mathematical programming, and simulation.
"Harry Markowitz is the Marvin Speiser Distinguished Professor of Finance and Economics at Baruch College, NYC. He developed the portfolio selection model in his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Chicago. First published in 1952, today his model is one of the most widely used quantitative tools for investment analysis.
"During the late 50s Markowitz worked on mathematical programming at the RAND Corp. and also did his ground-breaking work on factoring bases and maintaining sparsity in the course of solving linear programs, in effect introducing the triangularization or LU factorization in place of inversion of the basis. His selection criterion for reducing fill-in when forming basis factors is the well-known Markowitz criterion and is still used in state-of-the-art codes for both LU and Cholesky factorizations. Markowitz's third main area of activity involved codifying the underlying notions of simulation by defining a world view composed of entities having attributes and belonging to sets that have defined relationships with each other. The state of the world changes through events, which are triggered by time. Based on this, in the 60s he developed a high-level simulation language, SIMSCRIPT, and in the 80s has collaborated with IBM researchers to develop EAS-E, an integrated data base, modeling and applications development language.
Dr. Markowitz told OR/MS Today that the award was a great honor and a reflection of the influence of von Neumann on portfolio theory."
Thursday, June 22, 2023
Leo Hurwicz (1917-2008), biography
Here's a web site devoted to the biography of Leo Hurwicz, by his son Michael: Leonid Hurwicz: Intelligent Designer
Monday, March 20, 2023
Victor Elias (1937-2023)
Victor Elias died last week, at 85. He had a strong influence on academic economics in Argentina, not least through the many influential Argentine economists he helped inspire to study in the U.S., particularly at the University of Chicago, where he got his Ph.D. in 1969.
Here's the funeral notice published yesterday in La Nacion:
Here's the obit from La Gaceta
Murió el economista tucumano Víctor Elías. Tuvo una reconocida trayectoria como académico en la UNT. Tenía 85 años.[Tucuman economist Víctor Elías died. He had a recognized career as an academic at UNT. He was 85 years old.]
"The renowned Tucuman economist and academic Víctor Elías passed away at the age of 85, leaving an enormous legacy that has marked several generations of Tucumans who studied Economics at the National University of Tucumán.
"The son of Syrian immigrants, he was born in the capital of Tucumán on July 21, 1937 and due to his ancestry he received the nickname "Turk", as he was known inside and outside academic circles. "
 |
| Victor Elias and Al Roth, Tucuman, November 2016, photo by Ivan Werning |
Monday, January 30, 2023
Tonya Ingram (1991-2022), health activist, died while waiting for a kidney
Tonya Ingram, a poet and health activist who testified in Congress about the long waiting list for kidney transplants, died last month while still waiting. Saturday's New York Times had a moving column about her activism, her struggle and her long wait.
Tonya Ingram Feared the Organ Donation System Would Kill Her. It Did. By Kendall Ciesemier (Ms. Ciesemier is a writer, a producer and an organ recipient.) Jan. 28, 2023
Here's her obit in the LA Times:
Tonya Ingram, an inspiring L.A. poet and ‘lupus warrior,’ died waiting for a kidney by Jireh Deng, JAN. 23, 2023
Market design isn't only about trying to allocate scarce resources effectively, it's also about working to make them less scarce.
Sunday, January 29, 2023
Paul David (1935-2023)
My Stanford colleague Paul David has died. He was an exceptional, iconic economic historian.
Gavin Wright has written this obit:
Professor Paul David died at the age of 87
"Always an economic historian, Paul soon extended his horizons in diverse and seemingly disparate ways. He became a strong advocate of the view that historical research should be fundamental to the economics discipline; in brief; “history matters.” The essence of the argument was captured by Paul’s incisive account of the persistence of the QWERTY typewriter keyboard despite its technical disadvantages, one of the most cited articles in all of economics (AER 1985). “History Matters” is the title of a festschrift presented by a group of Paul’s former students in 2004, in which the editors write: “No scholar has more forcefully and influentially argued the case for making economics a truly historical social science – one that, like evolutionary biology, gives past events a central role in understanding the present.”
"A continuing focus throughout Paul’s career was the diffusion of new technologies. An important early paper considered the adoption of the mechanical reaper in the American Midwest. Invention occurred in the 1830s, yet the first wave of adoption occurred only in the 1850s. The twenty-year delay, according to Paul, was explained by the fact that a minimum scale was required to cover the fixed costs of purchasing the reaper. Only when farms size passed this “threshold” did mechanization make economic sense. Specialists have debated the specifics ever since, but the basic form of Paul’s diffusion model has been highly influential. In many respects it formalized the accounts of delayed diffusion presented by our late colleague Nate Rosenberg, and thus became something of a “Stanford school” of thought in this area. Scrolling forward to 1990, the era of the “Solow paradox,” Paul offered an analogy between the delayed productivity effects of computer technology and a similar lag in the impact of electrification between the 1880s and the 1920s. With the IT-driven productivity surge of the late 1990s, this article also attained iconic status (AER 1990)."
Saturday, December 31, 2022
The year in passings
We come to the end of another long year.
Saturday, December 10, 2022
Thursday, September 1, 2022
Elizabeth "Betsy" E. Bailey (1939-2022)
Monday, August 29, 2022
ANTHONY PETER "TONY" MONACO M.D. 1932 - 2022--performed first kidney exchange in the U.S.
Thursday, June 30, 2022
Friday, March 18, 2022
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Friday, February 18, 2022
IN MEMORIAM : Roy RADNER (1927-2002) by Jean-Michel Grandmont
Dale Jorgenson (1933-2022) by Bob Hall
Remembering Professor Emeritus Stuart Mestelman. Members of the McMaster community have shared their memories of Stuart Mestelman who died on June 25, 2022.
"In 1994, Stuart and his colleagues helped found the McMaster Experimental Economics Laboratory (McEEL). Stuart served as the lab’s co-director between 1994 and 2017, long past his official retirement from McMaster in 2008."
Remembering Robert Andrew “Andy” Muller (1943 – 2021)
"Professor Emeritus of Economics and Co-Director Emeritus, McMaster Decision Science Laboratory, Robert Andrew “Andy” Muller, passed away on October 14, 2021. He was 77 years old. "
Saturday, December 10, 2022
Amnon Rapoport (1936-2022)
Amnon Rapoport, a pioneer of experimental game theory, has died.
Here's a brief obituary:
I don't find his date of birth on the web, but in August of 1996 I participated in a conference in honor of his 60th birthday, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he had both studied and taught in the Department of Psychology. Amnon had already had several heart attacks by then, and his students, who loved him, thought it prudent to have a celebration of his work at that relatively young age, but that caution proved unnecessary.
Here's the volume of papers presented at that conference, edited by three of his students:
Budescu, David V., Ido Erev, and Rami Zwick, eds. Games and human behavior: Essays in honor of Amnon Rapoport. Erlbaum, 1999.
I first learned of his work when, as a grad student, I took a course in game theory taught by Michael Maschler, who told us about Amnon's experiments on the bargaining set.
He was a man ahead of his time, and maybe situated in the wrong discipline. It seemed to him natural that psychologists should take a leading role in the experimental study of game theory, and he noted with some regret that instead that literature had been ceded to economists. Here's a paragraph from the introduction to
Rapoport, Amnon. Experimental studies of interactive decisions. Vol. 5. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.
"The history of experimentation in psychology is rich and old. It would have been quite natural and highly desirable for psychologists to extend their scope of research and assume a major role in the study of economic decision behavior. Psychology professes to be the general study of human behavior. Most psychologists are trained to regard their discipline as an observational science; they do not have to overcome the conditioning of many economists who think of economics as an a priori science. Psychologists' knowledge of experimental techniques is comprehensive. and their experience in conducting experiments. analyzing data. and discovering empirical regularities exceeds that of most economists. However. with the exception of research on individual choice behavior - where psychologists like Tversky, Kahneman, and Slovic have played a major role - psychologists have not contributed in any significant way to the growing research in experimental economics. Social psychologists for whom interactive behavior is the core of their discipline, have virtually abandoned the study of economic decisions in small groups to their colleagues in economics and related disciplines. "
Here's his cv as of 2017, and his google scholar page.
**********
Update: here's an email that Rami Zwick sent to the Economic Science Association (ESA):
"Dear ESA community,
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our teacher, mentor, colleague, co-author and friend, Professor Amnon Rapoport, in Tucson Arizona on December 6, 2022.
Professor Rapoport served on the faculty of the University of California, Riverside School of Business; University of Arizona; UNC Chapel Hill; University of Haifa, Israel; and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then went on to earn his M.A. and Ph.D. in quantitative psychology at UNC Chapel Hill.
Professor Rapoport was one of the pioneers and leaders in the experimental study and quantitative modeling of human decisions in social and interactive contexts. During his distinguished career, he published four books (and edited others) and more than 300 research papers and chapters in leading psychological, management, operation, marketing, decision theory, economics, and political science journals, and is recognized as a leading authority in many of these areas. His most important and influential work was on experimental studies of interactive decision-making behavior. This includes theoretical and empirical research on:
• Coalition formation
• Bargaining
• Social dilemmas
• Behavioral operations management
• Behavioral game theory
• Dynamic pricing
• Directed networks
Professor Rapoport’s work was theory-driven, and, in most cases, the theory was represented formally by mathematical (primarily, but not exclusively, game theoretical) models. At the same time, he was a meticulous and rigorous, yet imaginative and creative experimentalist. In fact, he was one of the pioneers of computerized experimentation in the domain of individual and group decision making.
With a career spanning over 60 years, Professor Rapoport nurtured and supported the careers of generations of scholars and researchers. He will be greatly missed by his family, friends, colleagues, co-authors, and students."
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