Leonid Hurwicz quotes

Leonid Hurwicz was a Polish-American economist and mathematician, renowned for his pioneering work in mechanism design theory. His research provided the foundation for understanding how information and incentives shape economic outcomes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to this field. Here are 9 of his quotes:

My interest had been in a broad class of situations, broader than the advanced industrial market economies, including situations in third world countries, and in countries attempting to have some kind of socialist approach to their problems. I have been interested in how one can construct efficient mechanisms that have the decentralization features similar to a market but that do not necessarily resemble a market. For this purpose, I formulated the notion of an informationally-decentralized economy in which perfect competition was just a very special case...

Leonid Hurwicz

There were times when other people said I was on the short list, but as time passed and nothing happened, I didn't expect the recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were slowly dying off.

Leonid Hurwicz

Had it merely called to our attention the existence and exact nature of certain fundamental gaps in economic theory, the Theory of Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Morgenstern would have been a book of outstanding importance. But it does more than that. It is essentially constructive: where existing theory is considered to be inadequate, the authors put in its place a highly novel analytical apparatus designed to cope with the problem. It would be doing the authors an injustice to say that theirs is a contribution to economics only. The scope of the book is much broader. The techniques applied by the authors in tackling economic problems are of sufficient generality to be valid in political science, sociology, or even military strategy. The applicability to games proper (chess and poker) is obvious from the title. Moreover, the book is of considerable interest from a purely mathematical point of view.

Leonid Hurwicz

My work in this area started around 1950 when I was still with the Cowles Commission. I was writing a more or less expository paper dealing with activity analysis...and happened to use the term "decentralization,” which was then often applied to the market mechanism as a sort of a selling point. But when I used the word "decentralization” I thought I should explain what I meant. So I made a footnote mark, went to the bottom of the page, and began writing, "By decentralization we mean...” But then it struck me that I did not know what we meant by decentralization. That was the beginning of many years of work trying to clarify the concept, because I thought that if we think this property is so important, we should be able to define what it is.

Leonid Hurwicz

Legal behavior is not incompatible with rational, self-interested behavior.

Leonid Hurwicz

There are two kinds of games in economics. One is the game where people use only legal moves. Then there is the true game, the one like real life, where the strategies and moves people make, some of them contain illegal gains.

Leonid Hurwicz

I had the belief that many troubles you could observe on the European continent were due to politicians not understanding economic phenomena. Even if they had good intentions, they didn't have the skills to solve problems.

Leonid Hurwicz

Since I shall be indicating my disagreement with some of the points made by Professor Israel Kirzner, let me stress that I am in complete sympathy with his point of departure, namely, the emphasis on the dispersion of information among economic decision-making units (called by him, "Hayek's knowledge problem") and the consequent problem of transmission of information among those units. Much of my own research work since the 1950s has been focused on issues in welfare economics viewed from an informational perspective. The ideas of Hayek (whose classes at the London School of Economics I attended during the academic year 1938-39) have played a major role in influencing my thinking and have been so acknowledged.

Leonid Hurwicz