Professor Leonid Hurwicz: Nobel Prize-winning economist

Leonid Hurwicz was one of the finest economists of his generation. He made many important contributions to economic theory, the most significant of which was his invention of the field of mechanism design, an achievement which was recognised several decades later, in 2007, by the award of the Nobel Prize for Economics, which he shared with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson. Mechanism design is a framework for studying fundamental questionsabout social organisations. In the first half of the 20th century, there was a long-running debate among economists about whether socialism was compatible with economic efficiency. Oskar Lange and others argued that socialist institutions for rational resource allocation could be devised, while Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek denied that they were even theoretically feasible, for reasons to... [read full story]