【10月30日】K.J.阿罗：Discounting a long and uncertain future

Fudan talk 30 10 08.doc

Professor Kenneth J. Arrow was born in New York City in 1921,  graduated from the City College of New York in 1940, served in the United States Air Force as a weather officer from 1942 to 1946,  and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 1951.  His appointments include Research Associate at the Cowles Commission (now Foundation) in Economic Research (1947-9) during an extraordinary period, with such colleagues as Jacob Marschak, Tjalling Koopmans, Leonid Hurwicz, Lawrence Klein, and Franco Modigliani, faculty positions at the University of Chicago, Stanford University (most of his career), and Harvard University, and long-time consultant at the RAND Corporation.

His has published work on a variety of topics in economics and some outside. The latter include studies of the optimal use of wind forecasts for flight planning and of the foundations of sequential analysis of statistical data.  The former include work on social choice, the use of securities for risk-bearing, general equilibrium theory, the economics of information, with special reference to asymmetric information, inventories, economic growth and its measurement, medical economics, and the economics of innovation.

He has received a number of honors, including the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and the von Neuman Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, as well as 25 honorary degrees.  He has also been president of a number of learned societies and member of several honorary societies.