>From the New York Times online edition, 26 June 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/business/26hurwicz.html

Humberto Barreto




Leonid Hurwicz, Nobel Economist, Dies at 90

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: June 26, 2008


Leonid Hurwicz, who shared
the Nobel Prize in economics last year for his work on mechanism design
theory, which helps explain the interaction among individuals, markets and
institutions, died Tuesday. He was 90 and lived in Minneapolis.

The death was confirmed by Mark Cassutt, a spokesman for the University
of Minnesota, where Mr. Hurwicz (pronounced HER-wich) was an emeritus
professor of economics. He had been undergoing dialysis in a Minneapolis
hospital, The Associated Press reported.

?Before Leo, people said, ?Let?s just ask people to achieve outcomes, such
as how much steel to produce or how many shoes to make,? ?
Varadarajan V. Chari, a professor of liberal arts and economics at the
University of Minnesota, told the university?s alumni magazine.

An early champion of game theory as it applies to mechanism
design, Mr. Hurwicz proposed that desired outcomes can be achieved only if
people are provided with the right kind of incentives.

?That was a fundamental breakthrough in thinking about economics
policy and economic reform,? Mr. Chari said.

An example of incentives applied to a mechanism is a second-price auction, in which
the seller wants bidders to offer their true estimates of the value of the
item being auctioned. The highest bidder wins, but pays only the amount
offered by the second-highest bidder. This is an incentive for bidders to
tell the truth without being penalized.

Mr. Hurwicz?s ideas were further developed by two 56-year-old economists who shared the
prize: Roger B. Myerson, a professor at the University of Chicago, and
Eric S. Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, N.J. Their work gave economists and policy makers a new way of
thinking about how to structure economic incentives and institutions to
enhance social welfare.

Mr. Hurwicz was born in Moscow to
Jewish parents who had fled from Poland after World War I. The family
moved back to Warsaw, where Mr. Hurwicz earned a law degree at Warsaw
University.

It was a course in economics that fired his
imagination, however, and he went to the London School of Economics, where
his teachers were Nicholas Kaldor and Friedrich Hayek. In 1939 he moved to
Geneva, where he studied at the Graduate Institute of International
Studies and attended the seminar of Ludwig von Mises.

His parents and a brother, who had fled the Nazis and been interned in Soviet
labor camps, rejoined him in the United States, where he had emigrated in
1940. He was a research assistant to the economist Paul Samuelson, who won
the Nobel Prize for economics in 1970, and to Oskar Lange at the
University of Chicago. He never actually earned an economics degree.

During the war, Mr. Hurwicz was a member of the faculty of the
Institute of Meteorology at the University of Chicago and taught
statistics in the department of economics. He also worked for the Cowles
Commission for Research in Economics, which sought to link mathematics and
economics by creating mathematical models of the economy.

In 1944 he married Evelyn Jensen, who survives him, as do their four
children, Sarah, Michael, Ruth and Maxim.

In 1951 he became a
professor of economics and mathematics in the School of Business
Administration at the University of Minnesota. He became chairman of the
university?s statistics department in 1961, Regents? Professor
of Economics in 1969 and the Curtis L. Carlson Professor of Economics in
1989.

Mr. Hurwicz was the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel
Prize, which seemed to be eluding him with each passing year.

?There were times when other people said I was on the short list,
but as time passed and nothing happened, I didn?t expect the
recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were
slowly dying off,? he said at a news conference after he won.