>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.