An economist who put a premium on truth: Obituary of Leonid
Hurwicz Financial Times comment, 19 July 2008 Leonid Hurwicz,
the economist who last year became the oldest person ever to win
a Nobel prize, helped transform economic thinking in the second
half of the 20th century. For years economists had been
passionately debating the rival merits of state planning versus
free markets. In both systems, people had incentives to lie to
bureaucratic planners or to employers about their interests,
their skills or their circumstances. “Leo”, who has died at the
age of 90, founded the field of “mechanism design”, a new way of
thinking which focused on giving people incentives to tell the
truth and to do so in a way that would benefit society as a
whole. His mechanism design idea has applications in a range of
practical areas, from the design of computer networks and voting
systems to arbitration rules. The debate between state planning
and free markets must have seemed far from academic to Hurwicz.
His parents were Pol