Leonid Hurwicz

Leonid "Leo" Hurwicz (born August 21, 1917 to a Jewish family in Moscow) is Regents’ Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Minnesota and co-winner, along with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Biography

He was born in 1917 to a Jewish family in Moscow, only several monthes before the October Revolution. His family flew from Bolshevicks in 1919. In 1938 he received his LL.M. from Warsaw University - Poland. In 1939 he studied in London School of Economics and then went to Geneva. After the WWII started he was forced to move to Switzerland, then to Portugal, and finaly Hurwicz emigrated to the united States. His parents and brother fled Warsaw only to be interned in Soviet labor camps.

Internationally renowned for his pioneering research on economic theory, particularly in the areas of mechanism and institutional design and mathematical economics, he received the National Medal of Science in 1990 in Behavorial and Social Science "For his pioneering work on the theory of modern decentralized allocation mechanisms.".

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Hurwicz is a former President and Fellow of the Econometric Society. The recipient of six honorary doctorates, he serves on the editorial board of several journals and coedited and contributed to two collections for Cambridge University Press, Studies in Resource Allocation Processes (1978, with Kenneth Arrow) and Social Goals and Social Organization (1987, with David Schmeidler and Hugo Sonnenschein). His recent publications include papers in Economic Theory (2003, with Thomas Marschak), Review of Economic Design (2001, with Stanley Reiter), and Advances in Mathematical Economics (2003, with Marcel K. Richter).

His wife is Evelyn Hurwicz (born October 31, 1921 - ). They have four children: Sarah, Michael, Ruth and Maxim.

In October 2007, Hurwicz shared the Nobel prize in Economics with Roger Myerson and Eric Maskin "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".

Bibliography

• Hurwicz, L. (1973). The design of mechanisms for resource allocation, Amer. Econ. Rev., 63, pp. 1-30.

Graduated in Warsaw University. A list of Leo's major works is available at http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/hurwicz.htm