UCLA的著名经济理论家Jack Hirshleifer 于2005年7月26日过世，享年79岁。
Jack Hirshleifer, 79: Professor Emeritus
With great sadness, the department notes the passing of Professor Jack Hirshleifer on July 26, 2005
Jack Hirshleifer
Emeritus Professor
Department of Economics
UCLA
Jack Hirshleifer is an economic theorist with broad-ranging interests. Two areas in economics have especially felt the impact of his work. Early in his career, he was instrumental in the information economics revolution; most recently he has expanded the domain of economic discourse with his work on evolutionary economics and conflict resolution.
Hirshleifer spanned a broad range of issues in his early work as one of the founding fathers of information economics. He made the abstract ideas of contingent claims concrete through his examples and applications. In the process, he helped develop fundamental tools, such as the covariance of risks, the analysis of gambling and insurance, the Modigliani-Miller Theorem, and the analysis of public investment. He also expanded the range of information economics with two fundamental contributions. His work on the private and social value of information clearly shows that competitive markets need not reflect the social value of information. His example of an inventor who can invest based on the knowledge of the impact of his invention shows that there can be an oversupply of inventive activity. This "race to be first" has its reflection in the current literature on patent races, and represents a fundamental problem in intellectual property law that the profession is only now coming to grips with. His second fundamental contribution showed that differences in taste are not enough to explain speculation. He was the first to analyze speculation in a full general-equilibrium model, with different structures of market completeness carefully considered. Although not generally recognized as such, this is also the first paper to point out the indeterminacy of equilibrium when markets are incomplete.
In addition to his founding contributions in information economics, Hirshleifer has had a lifelong interest in conflict, beginning with his earliest work on war damages. In recent years this area has been the focus of his contributions, and he has been a leader in extending economic methods to problems more traditionally studied in political science. He has written broadly on expanding the domain of economic discourse to include the "rational" evolutionary analysis of altruism and spite. His work on conflict shows how "Peace is more likely to the extent that the decisiveness of conflict is low, or ... if the stakes are small or the technology favors the defense. More surprisingly, perhaps, increased productive complementarity between the parties does not systematically favor peace...the poorer side is generally motivated to invest more heavily in fighting effort. So conflict can become an income-equalizing process." Finally, his weakest link/best shot experiment (with Glenn Harrison) demonstrates that economic incentives play a key role in determining how much people will contribute to a public good.
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