Egon Balas, 1922-2019

I only now learned that Egon Balas passed away in March, at the age of 96.  

I last saw him in 2017, full of energy at an IFORS conference in Quebec City. We became friends in Pittsburgh, where he was the leader of the OR community at CMU.

He came to operations research in the second half of his life, after an incredibly dramatic first half.  Here's a link to his CMU obituary:

March 19, 2019, Remembering Egon Balas

"His early life included two imprisonments—one for joining the communist party to oppose the Nazis during World War II and the second by the communist party after the war in a Stalinist purge. He later became one of the world’s foremost experts in mathematical optimization after joining Carnegie Mellon in 1967."

Here's the WSJ obituary:

Egon Balas, Jailed and Tortured in Romania, Found Salvation in Math

After losing his faith in Marxism, academic discovered a genius for devising algorithms and solving business problems

And here's the obit from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

Obituary: Egon Balas | WW II freedom fighter became ‘legendary scholar’ at CMU

Ed Green, 1948-2019

Ran Shorrer at Penn State passes on the news that his colleague Ed Green died Saturday morning after a long fight with cancer. Ed and I were colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1980s.  He was a scholar's scholar and a gentle man.

Perhaps his most famous paper is Green and Porter (1984), which outlined how cartels could effectively coordinate on high prices even when they could only imperfectly monitor one another, by engaging in price wars when defection was suspected:

ECONOMETRICA: JAN 1984, VOLUME 52, ISSUE 1

Noncooperative Collusion under Imperfect Price Information

https://doi.org/0012-9682(198401)52:1<87:ncuipi>2.0.CO;2-6
p. 87-100

Edward J. Green, Robert H. Porter

Recent work in game theory has shown that, in principle, it may be possible for firms in an industry to form a self-policing cartel to maximize their joint profits. This paper examines the nature of cartel self-enforcement in the presence of demand uncertainty. A model of a noncooperatively supported cartel is presented, and the aspects of industry structure which would make such a cartel viable are discussed.


Ed also has a series of papers with his wife, Ruilin Zhou.
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Update: here's an obituary.
Obituary of Edward James Green, 71
10/28/2019

In Memoriam: Martin Shubik

Ben Mattison and Kerry DeDomenico at Yale have sent around an email pointing to some brief remembrances of Martin Shubik from his friends, that was distributed at his memorial service.

In memoriam: Martin Shubik

 It's short, read the whole thing and think of Martin. 

I would have loved to read what Lloyd Shapley would have said about Martin, but I was delighted to read, in Pradeep Dubey's loving account, what Martin once said about Lloyd, after beating him in a game of Go: “No matter what happens in the game, Lloyd always wins the analysis.”

If you're in a hurry, here's what Bob Aumann had to say about Martin's professional contribution:

"I think the most important thing that can be said about Martin scientifically is that he is simply the father of the application of game theory to modern economic theory—an immensely important contribution. Von Neumann & Morgenstern’s book is called “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” and indeed they must be credited with the fundamental idea of studying economics with Game Theory tools; but their approach—Stable Sets—never really caught on. It was Martin who made the highly successful connection of the Core with the Competitive Equilibria, and this is what got started the ball rolling."
Robert Aumann
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Some earlier posts:

Thursday, December 20, 2012 Martin Shubik

Thursday, August 23, 2018  Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Marty Weitzman, 1942-2019

For many years, Marty and I both had offices on the third floor of the Littauer building at Harvard.  I didn't know him well, but he was a big thinker,  who thought unflinchingly about the tail-end dangers of climate change.

His obit in the NY Times suggests that he was despondent about the future.

Martin Weitzman, Virtuoso Climate Change Economist, Dies at 77
A pathfinder in environmental economics who insisted on factoring in the worst-case scenarios of global warming

"In “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” (2015), Professor Weitzman and his co-author, Gernot Wagner, an economist at New York University, wrote: “One thing we know for sure is that a greater than 10 percent chance of the earth’s eventual warming of 11 degrees Fahrenheit or more — the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it — is too high. And that’s the path the planet is on at the moment.”

“Most everything we know tells us climate change is bad,” the authors concluded. “Most everything we don’t know tells us it’s probably much worse.”

"His analysis of the economics of climate change became known as the Dismal Theorem."

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Update: here's the Washington Post's obit:


Martin Weitzman, environmental economist who emphasized uncertainty, dies at 77

Mark Kleiman (1951-2019)

From the NY Times:
Mark Kleiman, Who Fought to Lift Ban on Marijuana, Dies at 68
"Kelly Kleiman, his sister and only immediate survivor, said the cause was lymphoma and complications of a kidney transplant he received from her in April.
...
"Beginning in the mid-1980s, Professor Kleiman was best known for what was then a cry in the wilderness: a thesis that wars on drugs waged on the basis of enforcement had failed; that alcohol does more harm than cannabis; and that the cost of banning marijuana altogether outweighed any of the benefits of prohibition. At the same time, he warned that complete legalization remained a high-risk gamble."

From Reason magazine

RIP Mark Kleiman, Who Brought Rigor, Dispassion, and Candor to a Frequently Overheated Drug Policy Debate
The widely quoted and consulted academic died yesterday at the age of 68.
JACOB SULLUM | 7.22.2019 12:50 PM

"Back in 1989, Mark Kleiman published a book, Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control, that exemplified his calm, methodical, just-the-facts approach to drug policy. Kleiman argued that federal efforts to curtail cannabis consumption were ineffective and diverted resources from programs that had a better public safety payoff. Three years later, in Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, he came out in favor of legalizing marijuana, arguing that the costs of prohibition outweighed its benefits. At a time when three-quarters of Americans still supported marijuana prohibition, Kleiman's position was striking, especially coming from a widely quoted and consulted academic who had the ear of policy makers."
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From The Intercept:
Remembering Mark Kleiman, a Relentlessly Thoughtful Scholar of Drug Policy, by Maia Szalavitz

"As an opponent of drug war dogma, he was willing to explore alternative approaches to punishment, rather than argue for it to be abolished entirely. That’s a sharp departure from much of the left, which has often been content to firmly oppose the moral stain that is mass incarceration without seriously grappling with what alternative policies might look like. At its best, Kleiman’s work and teachings made people on all sides think much more deeply about their positions, regardless of where they ultimately came down.

"Kleiman supported going after drug dealers, but selectively targeting only the most violent and disruptive, to avoid, essentially, creating evolutionary pressure in markets that would favor the most ruthless and cause the most harm."
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From the National Review:

Mark Kleiman Was the Nation’s Greatest Thinker on Drug Policy

By GABRIEL ROSSMAN

"As expressed in its most programmatic form in Against Excess, Kleiman applied rigorous economic logic, but with the curious inversion that the markets he studied have severe externalities and ruin the lives of their most devoted consumers. Market failure and high transaction costs are policy successes when the commodity is poison, and so good policy means encouraging bad market design. For instance, Kleiman favored a noncommercial approach to marijuana decriminalization precisely because he expected nonprofit or state-operated dispensaries to be less efficient than for-profit firms, and in particular less likely to grow the user base through advertising and make intense use more convenient. The billboards advertising dispensaries, and even marijuana delivery, that saturate Los Angeles are exactly what Kleiman thought sensible decriminalization should avoid.

"But just as good market design has to be careful, so does deliberately bad market design. A major argument in Against Excess is that if you make selling drugs risky by locking up drug dealers (or encouraging them to shoot each other over territory), you build in a risk premium to the price, which draws in suppliers who don’t mind risk. The better approach is to create a deadweight loss so you don’t encourage more supply. For illegal drugs, make it a time-consuming hassle to score. For legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol, impose stiff excise taxes. In both cases the consumer faces costs that do not benefit, and therefore encourage, sellers. These costs might not discourage addicts in the short run, but long-run demand is relatively “elastic”: Increased costs from hassle or taxes can discourage potential users from starting and encourage existing addicts to quit.

"A curious consequence of Kleiman’s logic is that he consistently preferred an emphasis on retail markets rather than high-level distributors or source-country trafficking. His reasoning was that street prices substantially reflect retail markup. In the United States and most European countries, retail markup is about half of the purity-adjusted street price for cocaine and heroin, and the domestic wholesale price itself is about five to ten times higher than the wholesale price in source countries. Source-country interdiction efforts do increase wholesale prices, but this has little effect on retail prices and destabilizes countries. For instance, if you have read Killing Pablo or seen Narcos, you know about the escalation of the dirty war against the Medellin cartel by American intelligence and the Colombian National Police in the early 1990s, but this bloodbath had only a trivial and short-lived impact on retail cocaine prices in the United States, which is still cheaper than it was in the crack era."

Xenotransplants, Baby Fae, and the complex pioneering efforts of Dr. Leonard Bailey, RIP

The recent death of Dr. Leonard Bailey (who performed the first successful heart transplant to an infant) reminded me of how so many ultimately successful stories in organ transplantation begin with rather wild shots in the dark, involving patients who have little to lose.

Here's the NY Times obituary:

Dr. Leonard Bailey, Who Gave a Baby a Baboon’s Heart, Dies at 76
By Denise Grady, May 22, 2019

"Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, who elicited both admiration and outrage by transplanting the heart of a baboon into a dying infant in 1984, died on May 12 at his home in Redlands, Calif. He was 76.
...
"Although Dr. Bailey went on to pioneer human heart transplants for infants, and to build a renowned center for children’s cardiac surgery at Loma Linda University in Southern California, he remained best known to the public as the doctor behind the wrenching story of the infant known as Baby Fae.

...
"“I knew she was going to die, and I had to try,” Ms. Beauclair [Baby Fae's mom] said in a telephone interview. “If I hadn’t tried, I always would have wondered, could we have saved her?
...
"The operation took place on Oct. 26, 1984. At first, Stephanie seemed to thrive. During a news conference at the hospital, Dr. Bailey was ebullient, describing her as a “beautiful, healthy baby” whose transplanted heart was doing “everything it should.”

"Baby Fae made headlines around the world. The public was enchanted by her. But reactions to the surgery ranged from awe to horror.
...
"Animal rights groups said killing the baboon was immoral and held demonstrations outside the hospital and Dr. Bailey’s home. He and the hospital received threats.

“This wasn’t a wild whim,” Dr. Roger Hadley, dean of Loma Linda University School of Medicine, said in an interview. “He had worked for years on doing cross-species transplants in animals. We had a whole lab of animals who had somebody else’s heart.”

"Dr. Hadley added that the hospital at Loma Linda is faith-based — the hospital and the university are run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church — and said that all its ethicists and theologians had thought that the transplant was the right thing to do.

“We stood by him here,” he said.
...
"Stephanie’s initial rally after the surgery did not last. Rejection and organ failure set in, and she died on Nov. 15, 1984. She had survived for 21 days.

"Her case helped focus concern on the plight of babies born with fatal heart defects, and the desperate need for organs. The next year, Dr. Bailey performed the first successful heart transplant in an infant, from a human donor. He went on to perform 375 more over the course of his career, as well as other types of pediatric heart surgery. He continued operating until 2017.

"Because of growing ethical concerns about experimenting on primates, research on using them as a source of organ transplants has mostly been abandoned. But efforts are underway to genetically alter pigs to make their organs compatible with humans."

Memorial service for Martin Shubik today at Yale

I'm in New Orleans today, which I think Martin would have enjoyed, but if you are in New Haven, here's the Yale announcement:

Memorial service for economist Martin Shubik to be held March 30

"A service honoring the life of the late economist Martin Shubik will be held on Saturday, March 30 at 11:30 a.m., at the Graduate Club at 155 Elm St.  

Shubik, who died on Aug. 22 at the age of 92, was the Seymour H. Knox Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Institutional Economics at the Yale School of Management. He had been on the Yale faculty since 1963, specializing in game theory, defense analysis, and the theory of money and financial institutions.

Memories and photographs of Shubik can be posted here for display at the memorial service.

Donations in Shubik’s memory may be made to the Inclusion Body Myositis Registry at Yale. "

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Here is a brief July 2018 "Apologia" that Martin apparently wrote shortly before  his death in August:

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA: THE VANISHING OF THE WHITE WHALE IN THE MISTS
Martin Shubik, July 2018

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Here is my earlier post:

Thursday, August 23, 2018  Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Special issue of NRL in honor of Uri Rothblum, February 2019

Occasionally an Operations journal can bring memories flooding back: here's a special issue in honor of my old friend Uri Rothblum, who passed away in 2012. (We met in 1971, when we entered the Ph.D. program in Operations Research at Stanford.)

 The Journal Naval Research Logistics 
Volume 66, Issue 1, Special Issue:Uriel Rothblum, Pages: 1-102, February 2019

Here is the introduction, and the first paper, coauthored by Uri...

Introduction

• Michael Katehakis

• Pages: 3
 
• First Published: 26 December 2018

• Full text
 
• PDF
 
• Request permissions

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Free Access

Constant risk aversion in stochastic contests with exponential completion times

• Pelin G. Canbolat
 
• Uriel G. Rothblum

• Pages: 4-14
 
• First Published: 24 January 2017

• Abstract
 
• Full text
 
• PDF
 
• References
 
• Request permissions
• ***************************

The previous issue was in honor of Pete Veinott, Uri's Ph.D. advisor:
Volume 65, Issue 8 Special Issue:Pete Veinott 

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Here are other posts of mine remembering Uri.

The journal used to be called the Naval Research Logistics Quarterly, and I published three papers there from 1977 to 1982.

Dr. Oscar Salvatierra, Jr. (1935 - 2019)

Here's the Stanford obituary of the pioneering kidney transplant surgeon:

Pioneering pediatric kidney transplant surgeon Oscar Salvatierra dies at 83
Oscar Salvatierra founded Stanford’s pediatric kidney transplant program, helped write the national legislation that regulates organ transplants, and conducted research in kidney transplantation.

"Oscar Salvatierra Jr., MD, professor emeritus of surgery and of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a leader in the effort to enact national legislation regulating organ donation, died March 16 at his home in Menlo Park, California.  He was 83.

...

"A pediatric kidney transplant surgeon, Salvatierra was the physician most involved in the development and passage of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, the legislation that established a nationwide network to enable the fair and equitable allocation of donor organs to patients across the country.

"The law, on which Salvatierra collaborated with then-Congressman Al Gore, also banned buying and selling donor organs. It has served as a model for laws regulating organ transplantation around the world.
...
"Salvatierra developed methods that enabled small children to be successfully transplanted with adult-sized kidneys, making it possible for many children to receive kidneys donated by adult donors, including their relatives. He also pioneered an immune-suppression protocol for pediatric kidney transplant recipients that avoided steroid medications, which have harmful side effects in children, such as severe growth suppression."

Alan Krueger (1960-2019)

I was shaken today by the news of Alan Krueger's death:

Alan B. Krueger, Economic Aide to Clinton and Obama, Is Dead at 58

He was a leading light in the study of labor markets (from the effects of minimum wage, to the micro and macro returns of education).  He was also a leading policy architect, not least in his service as the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama.  (I interacted with him briefly when he was in that role, on matters concerning transplantation policy.)
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I'm reminded that many Americans of my generation encountered the poem Richard Corey as part of the elementary school curriculum.

Michel Balinski (1933-2019)

Michel Balinski, perhaps best known for his work on the design of voting systems*, has passed away.
Here's the announcement:

"INFORMS is saddened to share the passing of Michel Balinski, a long-time INFORMS member and a major figure in operations research, mathematics, economics, and political science. Balinski is best known for bringing O.R. methodology to bear on the electoral process, for which he is recognized as the inventor of several fair voting and representation systems. We invite you to share remembrances, photos, and other thoughts on this post, and to learn more about Michel Balinski's incredible career and contributions to the field. His full biography is available under INFORMS History of O.R. and Excellence on INFORMS.org."

*See e.g.
Fair Representation: Meeting the Ideal of One Man, One Vote  
By Michel L. Balinski, H. Peyton Young

The year in passings

Another year has passed, and I noted the passing in 2018 of several economists whose work has been important to market design.

Thursday, August 30, 2018 James Mirrlees 1936-2018

Thursday, August 23, 2018 Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Wednesday, May 30, 2018 Martine Quinzii, RIP

 It appears that I didn't make such a post last year, and so let's remember also these distinguished economists:

Thursday, May 4, 2017 William J. Baumol (1922-2017)

Monday, April 3, 2017 Julio Rotemberg (1953-2017)

Tuesday, February 21, 2017 Ken Arrow (1921-2017)

Sunday, January 29, 2017 Yuji Ijiri (1935-2017)

Tuesday, January 3, 2017 Tony Atkinson (1944-2017)

I also noted the passing of a giant of transplantation,

Monday, March 6, 2017 Tom Starzl (1926-2017)

and of one of my great teachers when I was in college:

Wednesday, September 19, 2018 Masataka Mori, Sensei (1938-2018)

Masataka Mori, Sensei (1938-2018)

OBITUARY OF MASATAKA MORI

Masataka Mori of Closter, age 85, born in Fukuoka, Japan, he attended Takushoku University and became captain of the Karate team. He came to the United States in 1963 as a karate instructor for the Japan Karate Association of Hawaii.   In 1968, he and his family moved to New York City, where he became the Chief Instructor of the JKA of New York and the Chief Instructor of JKA-Shotokan Karate-do International and attained the 9th Dan. In addition to teaching at his dojo, he had taught for years at New York colleges, including SUNY at Stony Brook, Columbia University, and CUNY, as well as a local schools, the Japanese Children’s Society. He often travelled abroad, acting as tournament arbitrator or judge, or teaching at various seminars.  This year marks his 50th year of teaching in New York City. He was an avid golf enthusiast and often participated in locally hosted Japanese American events.  Masataka Mori passed peacefully at his home in Closter, where he lived and gardened for forty years, surrounded by his devoted family. He is survived by Keiko, his wife of 61 years, his daughters Mayumi and Sayuri, their spouses Stephen and Alex, his four grandchildren, Allison, Kimiko, Andrew, Natalie, and Alexa and Kaitlin.

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The Talmud advises us to "Provide for yourself a teacher and get yourself a friend..." Mori Sensei was a great teacher and an inspiring friend. I met him when I matriculated at Columbia in 1968, and his teaching and friendship were among the most memorable and important parts of my years there.

I last saw Sensei Mori in 2013, and my wife Emilie finally got a chance to meet him, after often hearing about him:

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Honorary 7th dan black belt in JKA Shotokan karate, presented by Sensei Masataka Mori

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Here's a video of a recent basics class (which even advanced students take with some regularity, to go over the very basic movements that are taught to beginners), which reminded me of learning the unfamiliar commands in 1968, and sometimes not being completely sure which were in Japanese and which in English...

James Mirrlees 1936-2018

Here's the brief initial announcement from the University of Cambridge:

Professor Sir James Mirrlees 1936-2018

"It is with great sadness that I write to say that Professor Sir James Mirrlees has passed away. Jim died yesterday at his home in Cambridge.

"Jim is widely known as the author of some of the most luminous and influential papers in modern economics. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in public economics in 1996. But over and above his great intellectual achievement, Jim was widely respected and held in great affection for his generosity in encouraging and supporting economists from all over the world."

Sanjeev Goyal FBA
Chair, Faculty of Economics

**********

Jim last visited Stanford less than a year ago, last October, to participate in a conference remembering Ken Arrow.

Here's a video of his talk, which begins with an introduction by John Shoven, explaining a little-known early connection between Jim and Ken:

Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Ed Kaplan emails me with the sad news that Martin Shubik died yesterday.

Here's the first brief announcement from Yale School of Management:
Prof. Martin Shubik, Influential Game Theory Scholar, Dies

He was a pioneering game theorist, and a frequent collaborator with his graduate school roommate Lloyd Shapley. My understanding is that the two of them shared a double room, in a suite with John Nash. 

He suffered from a rare disease, Inclusion Body Myositis, and established a charity to organize research about it, Inclusion Body Myositis Registry at Yale.

He was a man of many parts. (See here, for example.)

Here are two photos I took of him at a Stonybrook conference in honor of Shapley. (In the second he must have been proving an especially difficult theorem...)

Martin Shubik in 2003

Two papers by Shapley and Shubik played important roles in areas in which I've worked:

The second (by publication date) was their landmark 1971 paper on matching as an assignment game (with all payments freely transferable), published in volume 1 number 1 of the International Journal of Game Theory: The assignment game I: The core

(Years after it was published, I asked Shapley what ever happened to part II, and his reply was "Never call a paper part I unless you have already written part II."  As I recall, he further said that the plan for the never-written part II had been to study the von Neumann-Morgenstern solutions of the assignment game.)

The first was their famous 1954 paper in the American Political Science Review, perhaps Shubik's most cited, on how to evaluate the strength of each position in "simple" coalitional games, in which every coalition is either 'winning' or 'losing'
A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System

I have many times used his model of escalation, The Dollar Auction Game, as an in-class demonstration of the importance of auction rules for auction outcomes and strategies.

Historians of game theory are sure to learn a lot from the archives of his papers and correspondence at Duke:
The Martin Shubik Papers: From Early Game Theory to the Strategic Analysis of War
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Update: Yale SOM has now published a long, fond remembrance:
Remembering Prof. Martin Shubik, 1926–2018

The King and Lloyd (in special issue of Games and Economic Behavior in Honor of Lloyd Shapley)

Games and Economic Behavior has published a

Special Issue in Honor of Lloyd Shapley: Seven Topics in Game Theory

Edited by David K. Levine

Volume 108, Pages 1-614 (March 2018)

The first paper in the special issue is this Introduction

Introduction to the special issue in honor of Lloyd Shapley: Eight topics in game theory

Pages 1-12

David K. Levine

Download PDF

David's introduction concludes with "Some remembrances of Lloyd," by various authors.  Here is mine: 

The King and Lloyd

By Alvin E. Roth

My first long conversation with Lloyd was when I visited him in 1974, having just finished my Ph.D. dissertation. I made what felt like a pilgrimage to see him at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, to tell him about my work.  

My last long conversations with Lloyd were in December, 2012, when we both attended the Nobel Prize celebrations in Stockholm. A careful observer might have noted that we had both aged a little since our first meeting. Lloyd walked with a cane, and that led to a small bit of logistics.

When you receive the Nobel from the King of Sweden, the King presents you with two packages, containing the diploma and the medal, which you hold with your left hand so that the two of you can shake hands. Lloyd was concerned about how he would manage this with his cane, and so we agreed that I would walk with him and hold his cane while he received the packages and shook hands, and return it to him immediately afterwards. Hence the picture below.

A subsequent encounter with the King had a touch of game theory. The night after the awards ceremony (and a very big dinner party in the City Hall) there is another dinner party in the royal palace, followed by a reception. At some point Lloyd was fatigued and ready to return to the hotel. But royal protocol dictates that no one should leave before the King, and that when the King leaves the party is over, and everyone leaves. So if the King had been told that one of his guests of honor was ready to go home, he would have felt obliged to depart and end the party to make this possible. To avoid ending the party prematurely, Lloyd therefore exited through the kitchen with the help of palace staff, without passing by the King and without alerting him and disrupting the party.  I thought it very appropriate that he exited with this small game-theoretic flourish.

Martine Quinzii, RIP

This sad news about Martine Quinzii comes from the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory.

In Memoriam: Martine Quinzii
"Our friend and colleague passed away on May 25, 2018 after a long illness that she faced with both courage and dignity.

She was a central figure of the Mathematical Economics community, inspiring us by her powerful intellectual agenda, sharp presence in academic gatherings, and irresistible enthusiasm for the reach of General Equilibrium analysis. Her PhD thesis on the core in production economies and its decentralization by marginal cost pricing attracted early attention, and her 1984 analysis of assignment economies is the first general existence result in economies with indivisible goods and money. But her most influential contribution is to the analysis of financial markets, to which, with her husband Michael Magill, she devoted a quarter century of her immense energy. This culminated in their 2008 book on the theory of Incomplete Markets, which is widely acknowledged as the best reference on the topic. The book combines mathematical rigor, formal elegance and accessibility to non-specialists.  The most recent of Martine and Michael’s important contribution improves our understanding of the role of money in general equilibrium models with financial frictions. She was also a very talented lecturer and she had the ability to communicate complex ideas with passion, rigor, and clarity.

Martine studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. She obtained her PhD in Mathematical Economics in 1986 and her Habilitation in 1988 at the University of Paris.  Before her departure to the US in 1986, she taught in Aix, Marseille, and Paris and was Research Associate at the Ecole Polytechnique. In the US part of her career, she taught at the University of Southern California from 1986 to 1995 and at UC Davis from 1995 to her retirement in 2016, and she chaired the Economics Department there from 1995 to 1999.

She was a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 2000, and an Economic Theory Fellow since 2011. She served as an Associate Editor of Econometrica, Economic Theory, Journal of Mathematical Economics, and several other academic journals.

We already miss her and our thoughts go to her family and to Michael Magill, her long term partner in economics and life.

May 29, 2018

Bernard Cornet, Hervé Moulin, and Jean-Charles Rochet"

Remembering Howard Raiffa

The Negotiation Journal has published some memories of Howard Raiffa, who passed away in July of last year. Here's my contribution:

Some Memories of My Academic Grandfather

Authors

• 
  

  
  

• First published: 18 October 2017Full publication history
• DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12203  View/save citation
• Volume 33, Issue 4, October 2017 Pages 373–374
• 
  

I first met Howard shortly after I received my Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1974. Robert B. Wilson, my advisor, had been Howard's student, and so Howard was my academic grandfather. I visited Howard in his office at Harvard Business School and talked with him about my dissertation. I had worked on a generalization of what were called von Neumann-Morgenstern solutions, which were sets of game outcomes, characterized by two properties, internal and external stability. As I recall the discussion, Howard said something like this to me: “If you want to generalize solutions, you have to give up one of those two properties. Which one did you give up?” When I told him I had relaxed the requirement of external stability, he paused and then said, “That's a lot to give up!” I recall thinking that my introduction to Howard had gotten off to a poor start.

I did not see Howard often after that until 1998, when my wife, Emilie, and I moved to Brookline, Massachusetts. We invited Howard and his wife, Estelle, to our Passover Seder, and they were among the last guests to arrive. They explained that they had driven from their home in Belmont to ours in Brookline, seen a line of cars parked outside a house similar to the one we had described, and had gone in and mingled. Only when that family took their seats for the Seder did they discover that they were at the wrong house. And indeed, they knew many more of the guests at our Seder. They became regulars at our Seder until they started spending more time in Arizona.

A distinguished line of academic descendants have followed Howard's lead in seeking what motivates practical behavior. These include Bob Wilson's students Paul Milgrom and Bengt Holmstrom, and a growing number of their students and mine as well. The thriving fields of experimental and behavioral economics and market design testify to Howard's legacy.

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Here is the table of contents of the special issue

1. Special Issue: Celebrating Howard Raiffa's Legacy
   

   James K. Sebenius and Max H. Bazerman

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12209

   • Abstract
   • Article
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2. Howard Raiffa: The Art, Science, and Humanity of a Legendary Negotiation Analyst (pages 283–307)
   

   James K. Sebenius

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12188

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   • Article
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3. Prescriptions Based on a Realistic View of Human Behavior (pages 309–315)
   

   Max H. Bazerman

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12189

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   • Article
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4. Conflict Resolution by the Numbers (pages 317–322)
   

   Carrie Menkel-Meadow

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12190

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5. Balancing Analysis and Intuition (pages 323–327)
   

   Lawrence Susskind

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12191

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6. Howard Raiffa and Our Responsibility to Rationality (pages 329–332)
   

   Richard Zeckhauser

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12192

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7. A Short Course from Howard Raiffa (pages 333–335)
   

   Deborah M. Kolb

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12193

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8. Counting and Caring (pages 337–339)
   

   Lawrence H. Summers

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12194

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9. Learning from a Tzadik about Academia, Following One's Own Path, and Life(pages 341–346)
   

   David A. Lax

   Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12195

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10. Overcoming the Tensions and Antagonisms of the Cold War to Create a Research Institute of International Eminence (pages 347–350)
    

    Mark S. Thompson

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12196

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11. Mr. Positive Sum (pages 355–357)
    

    William Ury

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12198

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12. Tales of a True Mensch (pages 351–354)
    

    Robert H. Mnookin

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12197

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13. Howard Raiffa: Scholar, Leader, Teacher, Mentor, Friend (pages 359–362)
    

    Ralph L. Keeney

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12199

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14. Wisdom in Simplicity (pages 363–365)
    

    Jared R. Curhan

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12200

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15. Bridging Data, Decisions, and Negotiations (pages 367–370)
    

    Michael Wheeler

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12201

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16. Life Is Not Binary (pages 371–372)
    

    Mary Rowe

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12202

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17. Some Memories of My Academic Grandfather (pages 373–374)
    

    Alvin E. Roth

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12203

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18. Asking the Right Questions (pages 375–378)
    

    Susan G. Hackley

    Version of Record online: 18 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/nejo.12204

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