Three Americans Win The Economics Nobel
Constraints on Free Information Flow in Markets
By blackhedd Posted in Economy — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Warmest congratulations to Leonid Hurwicz (emeritus, University of Minnesota), Eric Maskin (Princeton's IAS) and Roger Myerson (University of Chicago) on winning this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Story here.
Building on ideas originally proposed by Hurwicz, the prizewinning work relates to imperfections in information flow in free markets.
Orthodox neoclassical economics holds that perfectly-free markets automatically and rapidly discount all available information. Not only is this clearly not true in practice, but there have also been several recent theoretical challenges to this view as well.
Among the key insights of "mechanism-design theory" is that participants in markets, elections, and negotiations have different incentives, and thus will tend to constrain the dissemination of information in ways that lead to suboptimal outcomes.
The United States continues its dominance of the Economics Nobel, with about two-thirds of all Economics Nobelists since Sweden's central bank first began awarding the prize in 1969.
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Three Americans Win The Economics Nobel 6 Comments (0 topical, 6 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
How many currently retired members of their faculty have won it?
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
You don't "retire." You become Emeritus. I believe Coase is at that point and I don't know about Fogel. Heckman, Lucas, Myerson, and Becker all still teach and research full time although Lucas and Becker are definitely getting up there in years.
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Congratulations to the three American economists who won the nobel prize this year. Another facet to be proud of - all three are Jewish. What a wonderful country to allow expression of thought. It is what makes our country work. For a list of Jewish economists - try this link:
http://www.jinfo.org/Economists.html (not all are American; there is a short list of incredibly influential economists such as Milton Friedman and Ludwig Von Mises, and a long list including 2 of the 3 current Nobel Prize winners).
One of the three is already on the short list!
This is the greatest place on Earth to live, if we can maintain it and hold it together. We've got the All-American Team™! And we can all help people build prosperity everywhere on the globe.
True story, a family tale:
My grandfather, who never progressed beyond the sixth grade in his formal education, was nevertheless an exceptionally intelligent and talented man who fought his way successfully through the Great Depression. His fondest wish to his children was for them to attend good Universities even if that meant a lot of personal sacrifice. And all of them did, and one of the reasons he wanted them to aspire was because he was *inspired* as a Pole by the Jewish friends he knew. The rest is history.
I'll never forget his one-line, classic advice to me when I started high school: "Study hard. There are a lot of Jews out there!" He meant that admiringly.
It's a wonderful tradition that merit is recognized and encouraged in this country. I hope that never changes.
Problems in Information Sharing are incredibly important to my own life, even in the mundane thing that I do right now, which is printing and mailing. I found out today that the sales executive who works with me every day has absolutely no idea of what the value of the work I produce with the printers he sells me actually is.
Unbelievable! I could have hit him with a Spiked Pipe™. Instead I just told him and showed him why.
He was one of the better teachers in the Economics Department. And he covered his specialty very well, unsurprisingly. I think this means the Chicago Economics Department has 6 Nobles on staff (Lucas, Becker, Heckman, Coase, Fogel and Myerson). That's freaking insane.
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