Keynote Speaker:
Hervé Moulin received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Université de Paris in 1975 and taught at the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et Administration Economique and Dauphine University in Paris before moving to the USA in 1984, first at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, then Duke and Rice Universities.
He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 1983, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh since 2015, and of the British Academy since 2018. He has written five books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles. In January 2021 he became the Editor in Chief of Games and Economic Behavior.
His work has contributed to redefining the field of ‘normative economics’, by borrowing concepts and techniques from social choice, game theory and mechanism design. The goal is to invent new mechanisms --or justify existing ones-- in a variety of resource allocation problems.
Main Content:
Arrow’s supremely ambitious Social Choice and Individual Values (1951) initiates the axiomatic approach to the design of institutions distributing political and economic resources. Importing the tools of Game Theory to capture the role of selfish motives resulted, two decades later, in the methodology and research tools defining the Mechanism Design Program. I will illustrate some typical -- but by no means exhaustive -- successes of this program: the impartial division of a monetary gain jointly produced by peers when only their own subjective evaluations of who deserves what share can be used; the fair division of a jointly produced cost relying on objective but virtual data about the virtual costs that each subset of the responsible agents would have generated; the fair division of private commodities held in common property between their owners; first when their utility functions are additive in the share of each commodity (perfect substitutability); next when these utilities treat the commodities as perfect complements (Leontief utilities).
Time：
January 9, 2026 (Friday), 14:00
Venue：
Coffee Beanery
Organizer:
Advanced Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (AI-HSS)
