Leonid Hurwicz - Teaching and Research

Teaching and Research

Hurwicz received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945–1946. In 1946 he became an associate professor of economics at Iowa State College. From January 1942 until June 1946, he was a research associate for the Cowles Commission. Joining full-time in October 1950 until January 1951, he was a visiting professor, assuming Koopman's classes in the Department of Economics, and led the commission's research on theory of resource allocation. He was also a research professor of economics and mathematical statistics at the University of Illinois, a consultant to the RAND Corporation through the University of Chicago and a consultant to the U.S. Bureau of the Budget. Hurwicz continued to be a consultant to the Cowles Commission until about 1961.

Hurwicz was recruited by Walter Heller to the University of Minnesota in 1951, where he became a professor of economics and mathematics in the School of Business Administration. He spent most of the rest of his career there, but it was interspersed with studies and teaching elsewhere in the United States and Asia. In 1955 and again in 1958 Hurwicz was a visiting professor, and a fellow on the second visit, at Stanford University and there in 1959 published "Optimality and Informational Efficiency in Resource Allocation Processes" on mechanism design. He taught at Bangalore University in 1965 and, during the 1980s, at Tokyo University, People's University (now Renmin University of China) and the University of Indonesia. In the United States he was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1969, at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976, at Northwestern University twice in 1988 and 1989, at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998, the California Institute of Technology in 1999 and the University of Michigan in 2002. He was a visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois in 2001.

Back at Minnesota, Hurwicz became chairman of the Statistics Department in 1961, Regents Professor of Economics in 1969, and Curtis L. Carlson Regents Professor of Economics in 1989. He taught subjects ranging from theory to welfare economics, public economics, mechanisms and institutions and mathematical economics. Although he retired from full-time teaching in 1988, Hurwicz taught graduate school as professor emeritus most recently in the fall of 2006. In 2007 his ongoing research was described by the University of Minnesota as "comparison and analysis of systems and techniques of economic organization, welfare economics, game-theoretic implementation of social choice goals, and modeling economic institutions."

Hurwicz's interests included mathematical economics and modeling and the theory of the firm. His published works in these fields date back to 1944. He is internationally renowned for his pioneering research on economic theory, particularly in the areas of mechanism and institutional design and mathematical economics. In the 1950s, he worked with Kenneth Arrow on non-linear programming; in 1972 Arrow became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Economics prize. Hurwicz was the graduate advisor to Daniel McFadden, who received the prize in 2000.

Earlier economists often avoided analytic modeling of economic institutions. Hurwicz's work was instrumental in showing how economic models can provide a framework for the analysis of systems, such as capitalism and socialism, and how the incentives in such systems affect members of society. The theory of incentive compatibility that Hurwicz developed changed the way many economists thought about outcomes, explaining why centrally planned economies may fail and how incentives for individuals make a difference in decision making.

Hurwicz served on the editorial board of several journals. He co-edited 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 most recent articles were published in the journals "Economic Theory" (2003, with Thomas Marschak), "Review of Economic Design" (2001, with Stanley Reiter) and "Advances in Mathematical Economics" (2003, with Marcel K. Richter). Hurwicz presented the Fisher-Schultz (1963), Richard T. Ely (1972), David Kinley (1989) and Colin Clark (1997) lectures.