Morse lecture at INFORMS next year: market design and the study of operations

 In 1974, the year I received my Ph.D. from Stanford's (then) Department of Operations Research, it was unclear in what discipline game theory would best thrive.   As disciplinary boundaries shifted, I found that I was an economist.  But I've kept open my professional ties to OR, and indeed I think of market design as the engineering part of game theory, and very concerned with the operational detail of markets and marketplaces. So I was glad to accept an offer to compose a lecture on this for an OR audience, since market design is now a multi-disciplinary field that draws many students of operations.

Here's an announcement that includes the following:

Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award

The Lectureship is awarded in honor of Philip McCord Morse in recognition of his pioneer contribution to the field of operations research and the management sciences. The award is given in odd-numbered years at the Annual Meeting if there is a suitable recipient. The term of the lectureship is two years. The award is $2,000, a certificate, a travel fund of $5,000, a copy of Morse's autobiography, In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life, and a copy of Morse and Kimball's Methods of Operations Research. Learn more about the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award and how to be nominated on the INFORMS website.

This year, the lectureship is awarded to:

Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University

Who exemplifies the true spirit of Professor Morse and who, like Morse, has been an outstanding spokesperson for the operations research profession in operations research tools and ideas in designing efficient markets for a range of applications. This award is given by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences in honor of Philip McCord Morse, in recognition of Professor Morse's pioneering contributions to the field of operations research and of his devoted service to the field's professional societies.

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See also

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Market Design and Operations Research: an interview by the journal Mathematics of Operations Research

Muriel Niederle receiving the Morgenstern Medal: intro and speech (video)

Here's the video of Muriel Niederle receiving her  2021 Oskar Morgenstern Medal.

Starting at minute 25:45 you can hear Jean Robert Tyran introducing Muriel and her work. She is honored for her work in market design and her studies of gender in economic environments. The introduction is well worth listening to.  Muriel's talk begins at minute 52, and is called "A Gender Agenda." (She begins by noting "A lot of economists are not female.")

Ryan Oprea wins the Exeter Prize for the paper "What Makes a Rule Complex?"

 The Exeter Prize Committee has circulated the cheerful announcement below, about the latest winner of that prize (which has a very distinguished history):

"We are happy to announce the winner of the 2021 Exeter Prize for the best paper published in the previous calendar year in a peer-reviewed journal in the fields of Experimental Economics, Behavioural Economics and Decision Theory.

"The winner is Ryan Oprea (University of California at Santa Barbara) for his paper “What Makes a Rule Complex”, published in The American Economic Review. 

"This paper offers a crisp experimental measurement of complexity. It offers a rich description of how complexity affects actual humans, which has tremendous potential for informing policy making as well as theoretical research across disciplines (from psychology, computer science, and cognitive science to economics). In the experiment the subjects are asked to implement various decision rules. Five dimensions of complexity are studied: the number of states and transitions, existence of absorbing states and redundant states, and a measure of working memory. The paper looks at three different measures of behaviour: the error rate, the implementation time, and the subjects' own willingness to pay to get the decision rule implemented by a computer. The experiment also measures how fast people learn various decision rules and how transferable this knowledge is. This paper offers a new impetus for research, getting us outside of our comfortable box of constrained optimization. This is a risky and challenging attempt, with a high upside potential.

"The winning paper was selected by the panel of Nina Mazar (Boston University), Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA-UPF-Universitat Pompeu Fabra), and Tomasz Strzalecki (Harvard University). "

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Here's the paper:

What Makes a Rule Complex?  AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, VOL. 110, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2020  (pp. 3913-51  "By Ryan Oprea*

"We study the complexity of rules by paying experimental subjects to implement a series of algorithms and then eliciting their willingness-to-pay to avoid implementing them again in the future. The design allows us to examine hypotheses from the theoretical “automata” literature about the characteristics of rules that generate complexity costs. We find substantial aversion to complexity and a number of regularities in the characteristics of rules that make them complex and costly for subjects. Experience with a rule, the way a rule is represented, and the context in which a rule is implemented (mentally versus physically) also influence complexity"

Muriel Niederle wins the 2021 Oskar Morgenstern Medal

 Oskar Morgenstern medal for Muriel Niederle, September 24, 2021

Muriel Niederle from Stanford University is this year's winner of the Oskar Morgenstern Medal. (© Manuel Amador)

"The Stanford professor receives the fifth Oskar Morgenstern medal

"The Faculty of Economics will award the Oskar Morgenstern Medal for the fifth time on October 7, 2021. This year's winner is Muriel Niederle, Levin Professor at Standford University and a leading expert in experimental economics and gender differences in competitive behavior in the labor market.

"Muriel Niederle is a Levin Professor in the School of Humanities in the Economics Department at Stanford University, California, and a leading global expert in experimental economics and market design. With her research on gender differences in competitive situations, Niederle made a significant contribution to the discussion about application behavior on the labor market. For her extensive research, Muriel Niederle, who studied at the University of Vienna and did her doctorate at Harvard, was awarded the Oskar Morgenstern Medal for outstanding research achievements in economics.

"Niederle's experiments on gender differences in competitive behavior are known internationally beyond the scientific community: Why women negotiate differently and what effects this behavior shows on the labor market, for example in salary negotiations, reported on, among others, by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine and The Atlantic. As one of the leading experts on gender equality and funding issues, Niederle is a sought-after speaker at international meetings and conferences. Her most cited works to date deal with norms of gender competition, such as "Do Women Shy away from Competition? Do Men Compete too Much?" (2007) in cooperation with Lise Vesterlund and "Performance in competitive environments: Gender differences" (2003) in cooperation with Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini.

"The research focus on market design is dedicated to the question of how problems in non-self-regulating markets can be solved. Muriel Niederle carries out extensive studies and experiments in this area, for example on "Signaling in Matching Markets", a technique that is intended to bring companies and suitable applicants together more quickly.

"Muriel Niederle currently teaches at Stanford University in the fields of Experimental and Behavioral Economics and Gender.

"About the Oskar Morgenstern medal

"The Faculty of Economics is committed to conducting research at the highest level and promoting the reputation of top international research: The Oskar Morgenstern Medal, named after Oskar Morgenstern, co-founder of game theory and until 1938 professor at the University of Vienna, was awarded the title in 2013 Honoring the great Austrian economist and launched to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the faculty. The previous winners are Roger B. Myerson (2013), Robert F. Engle (2015), Ernst Fehr (2017) and Sir Christopher A. Pissarides (2019). The medal is endowed with 10,000 euros and is awarded by the faculty every two years.

"Martin Kocher, Federal Minister of Labor, will present the award with Dean Gerhard Sorger at the award ceremony.

"Awarding of the Oskar-Morgenstern-Medal and subsequent Celebratory Speech.  Date: Thursday, October 7, 2021, 10:00 am - 11:30 am  Location: Skylounge (12th floor), Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Vienna

"The event is due to of the Covid-19 measures take place on a small scale and by prior arrangement. Interested parties can be there via live stream: oskar-morgenstern-medaille.univie.ac.at/

******

And here's Muriel's webpage: Muriel Niederle

Congratulations to 51 new Econometric Society Fellows of 2021

 This year there are 51 new Fellows of the Econometric Society:

Congratulations to our 2021 Fellows  

Jaap Abbring, Tilburg University

Chunrong Ai, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Ufuk Akcigit, University of Chicago

Simon Board, University of California, Los Angeles

Antonio Cabrales, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid

Arnaud Costinot, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Peter Cramton, University of Cologne and University of Maryland (Emeritus)

Stefano Dellavigna, University of California, Berkeley

Prosper Dovonon, Concordia University, Montreal

Christian Dustmann, University College London

Graham Elliot, University of California, San Diego

Marcella Eslava, Universidad de los Andes

Armin Falk, University of Bonn

Oded Galor, Brown University

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, University of California, Berkeley

Veronica Guerrieri, University of Chicago

Luigi Guiso, Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance

Bard Harstad, University of Oslo

Erik Hurst, University of Chicago

Patrick Kline, University of California, Berkeley

Fuhito Kojima, University of Tokyo

Botond Koszegi, Central European University

Rim Lahmandi-Ayed, University of Carthage

John Leahy, University of Michigan

Sydney Ludvigson, New York University

Ulrike Malmendier, University of California, Berkeley

Ramon Marimon, European University Institute

Alexandre Mas, Princeton University

Atif Mian, Princeton University

Magne Mogstad, University of Chicago

Benjamin Moll, London School of Economics

Sendhil Mullainathan, University of Chicago

Victor Murinde, SOAS University of London

Emi Nakamura, University of California, Berkeley

Volker Nocke, University of Mannheim

Nathan Nunn, Harvard University

Rohini Pande, Yale University

Bruce Preston, University of Melbourne

James Robinson, University of Chicago

Christina Romer, University of California, Berkeley

Antoinette Schoar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Matthew Shum, California Institute of Technology

Rohini Somanathan, Delhi School of Economics and University of Gothenberg

Stefanie Stantcheva, Harvard University

Wing Suen, University of Hong Kong

Balazs Szentes, London School of Economics

Silvana Tenreyro, London School of Economics

Aleh Tsyvinski, Yale University

Nicolas Vieille, HEC, Paris

Ebonya Washington, Yale University

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Paris School of Economics

 The Society is grateful for the work of its 2021 Fellows Nominating Committee consisting of Dirk Bergemann (Chair), Xiaohong Chen, Itzhak Gilboa, Kate Ho, Dilip Mookherjee, Monika Piazzesi, and Hélène Rey. 

Publication Date: Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Daron Acemoglu receives the CME Group-MSRI Prize for Innovative Quantitative Applications

 Congratulations to Daron Acemoglu, who joins a distinguished group of winners of the CME-MSRI prize. The ceremony is tomorrow.

CME Group - MSRI Prize Virtual Seminar and 2020 Award CeremonyMay 05, 2021 (08:00 AM PDT - 10:30 AM PDT)

Description

2020 CME Group-MSRI Prize Announced

The 14th annual CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications will be awarded to  Daron Acemoglu. The ceremony will be held virtually on May 5, 2021 from 10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Central Time (8:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time). To register for this seminar, click here.

The CME Group-MSRI Prize is awarded to an individual or a group to recognize originality and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of economics.

About Daron Acemoglu

Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, inequality, labor economics, and economics of networks. He is the author of five books, including Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (both with James A. Robinson).

Acemoglu has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, and the Global Economy Prize in 2019. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

About the event

The event will feature a panel discussion on Perils & Promise of Big Data with the following panelists:

• Dr. E. Glen Weyl, Political Economist and Social Technologist, Microsoft Research
• Prof. Pascual Restrepo, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Boston University   
• Prof. Maryam Farboodi, Jon D. Gruber Career Development Professor; and, Assistant Professor, Sloan School of Management, MIT  
• Prof. Joshua Gans, Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and, Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Special guest Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson will present on the prizewinner's work.

• Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI); Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab; Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR); and, holds appointments at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Department of Economics and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
   

Register for this event

 

CME Group-MSRI Prize 2020  Selection Committee: Susan Athey, The Economics of Technology Professor; Professor of Economics (by courtesy), School of Humanities and Sciences; and Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford Business School; 2019 CME Group-MSRI Prize David Eisenbud, prize committee chair; Director, MSRI; and, Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley Jack Gould, Steven G. Rothmeier Professor and Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Albert S. (Pete) Kyle, Charles E. Smith Chair in Finance and Distinguished University Professor, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland; 2018 CME Group-MSRI Prize R. Preston McAfee, Distinguished Scientist, Google Leo Melamed, Chairman Emeritus, CME Group; and, Chairman and CEO of Melamed & Associates, Inc. Al Roth, Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University; Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University; 2012 Nobel Prize Myron Scholes, Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Business. 1997 Nobel Prize Winner  Robert Wilson, The Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business; 2016 CME Group-MSRI Prize; 2020 Nobel Prize

Medal awarded to the winner of the CME Group-MSRI Prize

 

The CME Center for Innovation’s mission is to identify, foster and showcase examples of significant innovation and creative thinking pertaining to markets, commerce or trade in the public and private sectors.

 

A list of past winners can be found on the CME Group-MSRI Prize site.

 

Matching theorist wins high school science talent search

 Yunseo Choi will attend Harvard next year, planning to study math and econ (see video below).

Teen Scientists Win $1.8 Million at Virtual Regeneron Science Talent Search 2021 for Remarkable Research on Infinite Matching Algorithms, Machine Learning to Evaluate New Medicines and Water Filtration   $250,000 top award goes to Yunseo Choi in nation’s oldest and most prestigious STEM competition for high school seniors

"TARRYTOWN, N.Y. and WASHINGTON, D.C.  – Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) and Society for Science (the Society) announced that Yunseo Choi, 18, of Exeter, New Hampshire, won the $250,000 top award in the 2021 Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors. Historically held in person in Washington, D.C., this is the second year in its 80-year history that the competition took place virtually to keep the finalists and their families safe during the ongoing pandemic. Forty finalists, including Yunseo, were honored tonight during a virtual winners’ award ceremony. More than $1.8 million was awarded to the finalists, who were evaluated based on their projects’ scientific rigor, their exceptional problem-solving abilities and their potential to become scientific leaders.

"Yunseo Choi won first place and $250,000 for her project where she played theoretical “match maker” for an infinite number of things or people. She studied matching algorithms that work for a finite number of couples and determined which important properties would still work for an infinite number of pairs. Matching theory has numerous real-life applications, including matching organ donors to recipients, assigning medical school applicants to rotations and pairing potential couples in dating apps."

HT: Scott Kominers

Mike Rees wins transplant surgeon excellence award for innovations in kidney exchange

Mike Rees, who founded the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation (APKD), received The American Association of Kidney Patients (AAKP)  2021 MEDAL OF EXCELLENCE AWARD at the American Society of Transplant Surgeons Winter Symposium (January 16),  during the ASTS Awards Ceremony.  In the two-minute video below, he accepts the award for his introduction of Nonsimultaneous Extended Altruistic Donor Chains, Standard Acquisition Charges, and Global Kidney Exchange (GKE).

von Neumann Award to Matt Gentzkow

 Matt Gentzkow is the recipient of the 2021 John von Neumann Award.

"We are excited to announce that the Assembly of the College elected Professor Matthew Gentzkow as the recipient of the 2021 John von Neumann Award. We are grateful that the Professor accepted our invitation to Budapest to receive the prize and give the John von Neumann Lecture once the pandemic situation permits.

"Matthew Gentzkow is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University where he studies applied microeconomics with a focus on media industries. Members of the College chose him for the 2021 John von Neumann award because of the substantive findings of his research on the political economy of the media market as well as his innovative use of new methods and data – especially the quantitative analysis of text. He received the 2014 John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Economic Association to the American economist under the age of forty who has made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a former co-editor of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

"The John von Neumann Award, named after John von Neumann is given annually by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies (Budapest, Hungary), to an outstanding scholar in the exact social sciences, whose works have had substantial influence over a long period of time on the studies and intellectual activity of the students of the college. The award was established in 1994 and is given annually. In 2013, separately from the annual prize, Kenneth J. Arrow was given the Honorary John von Neumann Award."

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research (apply or nominate now...)

 Here's the announcement of a new award, for promoting research integrity, reproducibility, and or other elements of research quality.

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research

"Objective

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research aims to provide recognition and publicity for outstanding efforts that enhance the rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency of research, and stimulate awareness and activities fostering research quality among scientists, institutions, funders, and politicians. To acknowledge the outstanding role early career researchers (ECRs) have in promoting research quality, ECRs will be invited to propose projects that foster research quality and value. Projects will be competitively selected for funding and internationally showcased.

Find out more about the objectives.

Award Categories

Individual Award: Individual scientist or small teams of collaborating scientists can be nominated. The laureate will be awarded €200,000.

 

Institutional Award: Governmental and non-governmental organizations, institutions, or other entities can apply or be nominated. The award-winning organization or institution will receive €200,000. If governmental organizations or institutions are the recipients of the award, they will not receive any funds in addition to the award itself.

 

Early Career Award: Early career researcher can submit a project proposal for an award of €100,000.

Find out more about the nomination and application requirements in the different categories."

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See a full description at the link...

Susan Athey wins the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications

 The seminar is tomorrow, it appears that registration is required.

CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications: Virtual Seminar Honoring Stanford Professor Susan Athey

DATE: December 11, 2020 TIME: 10:15 a.m. CT 8:15 a.m. PT

 

The virtual event honoring Athey will feature presentations focused on topics related to market design, including how food banks use markets and the intersection of markets with the COVID-19 pandemic response. Several distinguished economists and academics will be participating in the program, including:

• Scott Kominers – MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor, Entrepreneurial Management Unit, Harvard Business School
• Paul Milgrom – Shirley and Leonard Ely professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Economics at Stanford University; 2017 CME Group-MSRI Prizewinner; 2020 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences   
• Canice Prendergast – W. Allen Wallis Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
• Christopher Snyder – Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor in the Economics Department, Dartmouth College 

Finally! Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics

 Could this be the best Nobel pairing ever?  (It's certainly a great one, and one of the best things to come out of 2020 so far...) Here's the announcement:

"The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats" https://www.nobelprize.org/

I've known Paul at least since 1978, when he attended a course I taught while on leave at Stanford, on Axiomatic Models of Bargaining. Bob advised both of our dissertations, although not at the same time.  

Bob is a legendary advisor of grad students.  Paul is now the third of Bob's  students to win a Nobel.  So Bob is well established as the patriarch of a Nobel dynasty.

Bob Wilson's Nobel dynasty (to date): Wilson (with Milgrom) 2020, and Bob's students Roth (with Shapley) 2012, Holmstrom (with Hart) 2016, and Milgrom (with Wilson) 2020

It looks like we should check back in 2024...

Here's another picture, from another celebration:

Bob Wilson being celebrated for the 2017 CME MSRI prize, by his students Al Roth, Paul Milgrom, and Bengt Holmstrom.

I've often blogged about  both Milgrom and Wilson, separately and together.

Here's a paragraph I wrote about Bob's work in our (only) joint paper, in which we interviewed each other:

 How Market Design Emerged from Game Theory: A Mutual Interview

Alvin E. Roth and Robert B. Wilson
Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 33, Number 3—Summer 2019—Pages 118–143

"Wilson (1977) introduced the model of common-value auctions (sometimes called the “mineral rights model”). The model and its equilibrium initiated a large body of theoretical, experimental, and applied work. One important insight from this model is that winning an auction contains “bad” news, since it implies in equilibrium that the winner’s estimate is the highest. In equilibrium, rational bidders fully account for this, but the paper raises the empirical question of the extent to which actual  bidders are able to fully discount for the fact that, if they win the auction, they likely overestimated the value of winning. Thus, Wilson’s work initiated a new research program on the winner’s curse, involving systematic overbidding compared to equilibrium, sometimes involving losses to the winning bidder. The private-value model of Vickrey (1961) and the common-value model of Wilson (1977) together form the basis of much of modern auction theory and practice, since most auctions have elements of both private and common value." 

Right after that, Bob and I talked about important influences on our work. Bob included this:

"I was deeply affected in the early 1990s by working with Paul Milgrom on design of the FCC spectrum auctions. I marveled at his insights and creativity in constructing rules for a “simultaneous ascending auction” that would have good prospects of yielding an approximately efficient outcome in an environment afflicted with strong complementarities, dispersed private information about market fundamentals, and substantial market power."  

To which I replied:

" I was also much influenced by Paul when we developed and co-taught what may have been the first courses in market design, in 2000 and again in 2001 when he was on leave at Harvard and MIT." 

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Here's an old snapshot:

Bob Wilson and Paul Milgrom in 2006

There's a rabbinical literature about the relationships between students and teachers. It often comes to mind when I think about how lucky I have been to have the students I've had. But today I'm reminded of my luck in having Bob Wilson as my teacher and friend, and Paul as my friend and colleague.

"Joshua ben Perahiah used to say: provide yourself a teacher and acquire yourself a friend. Judge everyone favorably." (Pirkei Avot, chapt 1 verse 6)

Here's how I recalled Bob as a teacher, in an autobiographical essay of a kind that they will each now be asked to write:

"Bob Wilson agreed to be my advisor and rescued me from having what looked to be a very short academic career after I failed one of my Ph.D. qualifying exams. He was on sabbatical that year, but met with me regularly once a week for an hour. In memory, our meetings followed a kind of script: I would spend a while explaining to him why I hadn’t made progress that week, and then he would spend a while telling me not to be discouraged. Then I would describe some roadblock to further progress, and he would, as we finished our meeting, recommend a paper for me to read. Because his recommendations had always been very much on target, I would go straight from his office to the library and start to read the paper. As I did, I would think, this time Bob made a mistake, this paper has nothing to do with my problem. But then, somewhere in the middle of the paper would be a lemma or remark that helped me get around that roadblock …"

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And here's a final picture from Stockholm in 2012, of me and Emilie and Paul and Eva, with Parag Pathak (one of Bob's academic grandchildren) in the  background.

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Read the press release

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2020 to

Paul R. Milgrom
Stanford University, USA

Robert B. Wilson
Stanford University, USA

“for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”

...

“This year’s Laureates in Economic Sciences started out with fundamental theory and later used their results in practical applications, which have spread globally. Their discoveries are of great benefit to society,” says Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Prize Committee."
Learn more in the popular information

"Every day, auctions distribute astronomical values between buyers and sellers. This year’s Laureates, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, have improved auction theory and invented new auction formats, benefitting sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world."
Read the scientific background

Fuhito Kojima wins the 2021 Japanese Economic Association Nakahara Prize

 Congratulations to Fuhito Kojima, who is the 2021 winner of the Nakahara Prize of the Japanese Economic Association, which is awarded each year to an exceptional economist under the age of 45.

You can find the announcement (in Japanese) here. Google translate works well, and you can see the list of previous winners.

Here's part of the English announcement (which I can't find on the web...)

"The 2021 Japanese Economic Association Nakahara Prize

Professor Fuhito Kojima

"The Nakahara prize was established in 1995 and is funded by a donation from Mr. Nobuyuki Nakahara. The aim of the prize is to honor and encourage young researchers under the age of 45 to publish internationally recognized research. 

It is a great pleasure to announce that the 2021 Nakahara prize has been awarded to Professor Fuhito Kojima. Born in 1979, Professor Kojima received BA in economics from the University of Tokyo, and earned Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2008. He was Assistant, Associate and then Full Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and he is Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo from September 2020.

Professor Kojima’s research is focused on matching theory and market design. He has made a number of important contributions to the field. Many of his researches are motivated by various kinds of constraints imposed on matching problems in real life. His research significantly contributes to widening applicability of the theory to real matching markets.

...

"Selected Publications

1. “Job Matching under Constraints” (2020), joint with Ning Sun and Ning Neil Yu,  conditionally accepted, American Economic Review.

2. “Stable Matching in Large Economies” (2019), with Yeon-Koo Che and Jinwoo Kim, Econometrica, 87-1, pp65-110.

3. “Efficient Matching Under Distributional Constraints: Theory and Applications” (2015), with Yuichiro Kamada, American Economic Review, 105, pp 67-99.

4. “Matching with Couples: Stability and Incentives in Large Matching Markets” (2013), with Parag A. Pathak and Alvin E. Roth, Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, pp 1585-1632.

5. “Designing Random Allocation Mechanisms: Theory and Applications” (2013), with Eric Budish, Yeon-Koo Che, and Paul Milgrom, American Economic Review 103, pp 585-623.

6. “Asymptotic Equivalence of Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mechanisms” (2010), with Yeon-Koo Che, Econometrica 78, pp 1625-1672.

7. “Axioms for Deferred Acceptance” (2010), with Mihai Manea, Econometrica 78, pp 633-653.

8. “Incentives and Stability in Large Two-Sided Matching Markets” (2009), with Parag A. Pathak, American Economic Review 99, pp 608-27.

SELECTION COMMITTEE

Kosuke Aoki (Chair) (University of Tokyo), Anton Braun (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), Federico Echenique (California Institute of Technology), Yuichi Kitamura (Yale University), Fumio Ohtake (Osaka University), Tadashi Sekiguchi (Kyoto University), Mototsugu Shintani (University of Tokyo)

************

By a strange coincidence,  in 2013 I was the recipient of a non-academic award signed by Mr. Nobuyuki Nakahara, whose interests extend beyond economics.

USP celebrates Marilda Sotomayor: “It was like a good dream, in the middle of this nightmare that we are living in”

The JORNAL DA USP, the newspaper of the Universidade de São Paulo, celebrates Marilda Sotomayor on the occasion of her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“Foi como um sonho bom, no meio desse pesadelo que estamos vivendo”
“It was like a good dream, in the middle of this nightmare that we are living in”
Retired FEA professor, mathematics Marilda Sotomayor tells how she was invited to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
06/05/2020

Google translate does a pretty good job on Marilda's story of her journey from mathematics to mathematical economics, and matching theory.

Harvey Prize to Christos Papadimitriou

The Technion's 2018 Harvey Prize prize, to Christos Papadimitriou, has been only recently announced: it will be awarded this month.

From Columbia University:
Professor Christos Papadimitriou Awarded the 2018 Harvey Prize
OCT 08 2019

"The Harvey Prize for Science and Technology for 2018 is awarded to professor Christos Papadimitriou for his work on the theory of algorithms and computational complexity and its application to the sciences. Papadimitriou will receive the award at a ceremony at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Technion first presented the award in 1972 and two awards are given yearly. The scientists behind the genome editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 are also awardees this year.

“Professor Papadimitriou is considered the founding father of algorithmic game theory, defining key concepts, formulating key questions and proving basic results,” said Peretz Lavie, professor and president of the Technion. “He is a pioneer in the application of algorithms and complexity to other fields, including economics, biology and more.”

********
And here's the entry at the Harvey Prize link:

The Harvey Prize, established in 1971 by Leo M. Harvey of Los Angeles, is awarded annually at Technion for exceptional achievements in science, technology, and human health, and for outstanding contributions to peace in the Middle East, to society and to the economy.

PROF. CHRISTOS H. PAPADIMITRIOU

Leo M. Harvey (1887-1973) was an industrialist and inventor. He was an ardent friend and supporter of Technion and the State of Israel.

Over the years, more than a quarter of Harvey laureates have subsequently won the Nobel Prize.

The award ceremony will take place in November 2019 at Technion.

von Neumann award to Susan Athey

Susan Athey is the recipient of the 2019 John von Neumann Award.

"The John von Neumann Award, named after John von Neumann is given annually by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies (Budapest, Hungary), to an outstanding scholar in the exact social sciences, whose works have had substantial influence over a long period of time on the studies and intellectual activity of the students of the college. The award was established in 1994 and is given annually. In 2013, separately from the annual prize, Kenneth J. Arrow was given the Honorary John von Neumann Award."

Golden Goose Awards 2019

The Golden Goose Awards have been awarded for the 8th time. 

Here's an accompanying news story:

2019's Golden Goose Awards Celebrate The Silliest-Sounding Science To Benefit Society

Steve Leider celebrated for experimental economics

This cheerful email came in yesterday:

Dear ESA Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that Stephen Leider has been selected as the 2019 recipient of the Vernon L. Smith Ascending Scholar Prize for his research on behavioral operations management.

This $50,000 prize is presented by the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE).  You can learn more about IFREE, including its small grants program and workshops, at http://ifreeweb.org/.        

The Vernon L. Smith Ascending Scholar Prize is given to an exceptional scholar in the field of experimental economics whose work embodies IFREE’s mission to Promote Human Betterment through Experimental Economics to Improve the Understanding of Exchange Systems. Eligibility is limited to Assistant and Associate Professors (or equivalent). Dr. Leider was selected through a nomination process which identified many promising and highly-productive scholars in experimental economics who were then screened through peer review. Here is a link to the Prize announcement.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Leider for his outstanding work and accomplishments!

Finally, mark your calendars, we will be sending out the call for nominations for next year's award in the Spring.

Jim Murphy & Cary Deck
IFREE Board Members

Here's a picture of Steve (wearing a tie) after his dissertation defense ten years ago:

Alumni medals at Columbia

I am a proud grad of the Columbia University School of Engineering, which I attended as an undergraduate from 1968-1971.  I'll be back on campus this evening to get a medal, as will Dr. Harry L. Tuller.

You can read about us in the Columbia Engineering Magazine: Alumni Medalists 

David Kreps on Behavioral Economics (Nemmers Prize Lecture)

David Kreps won the 2018 NEMMERS PRIZE IN ECONOMICS , and
today, at Northwestern, he is giving his

NEMMERS PRIZE LECTURE

EVENT DETAILS

Wednesday, May 8, 2019
4:30 - 6:00 pm
McCormick Auditorium, James L. Allen Center
Free and open to the public

"SOME DIMENSIONS OF BEHAVIOR WITH WHICH ECONOMICS SHOULD CONTEND"

Behavioral economics is generally taken to mean economics in which the behavior of individual agents does not conform to the “standard model” of rational behavior.  However, under this banner, one finds a very large number of specific “nonstandard” models of behavior.  This very large number prompts a standard criticism of behavioral economics:  If any behavior is permissible, any conclusion can be reached.  

Using a small handful of examples, the lecture illustrates and fleshes out a test for the value of work in behavioral economics.  This test is based on three principles:

1.  Is the behavior in the model systematic, at least in some important contexts?
2. Does positing this behavior lead to economically significant phenomena?
3. Either via intuition or, preferably, empirical evidence, does the behavior provide "better" explanations of those significant phenomena, where defining the adjective “better” is the crux of the matter.