Sunday, October 27, 2019

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

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

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