After spending more than 20 years at Northwestern, Roger Myerson was working on the other side of Chicago when he found out he had won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences earlier this week.
Myerson, who taught economics at NU until 2001 and now teaches the subject at the University of Chicago, shares the award with Leonid Hurwicz from the University of Minnesota and Eric Maskin from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
Their work focused on mechanism design theory, which looks at how to restructure the economy to address minority populations that often go overlooked, said Morton Kamien, a Kellogg School of Management professor emeritus.
Myerson said he was flattered to see his name alongside past Nobel winners.
“That list of Nobel laureates is something that we look at – it’s a mark of what’s happened in our profession,” he said. “I was just overwhelmed to have my name in that list and very glad to see those other two names.”
He also recalled when he was hired in 1976 by Dean Emeritus Donald Jacobs and Kamien.
“They were willing to hire game theorists – not just me, but a lot of us,” Myerson said. “That made Northwestern’s Kellogg School just the best place in the world to do this work.”
Kamien said NU was the only university that offered Myerson a job. Myerson worked in Kellogg’s managerial economics and decision sciences department for most of his NU career.
“Nobody saw what we saw (in Myerson),” Kamien said. “We were prepared to take risks and take a chance.”
Jacobs, who was dean of Kellogg during Myerson’s time at NU, had only good things to say about Myerson.
“He’s a very sincere, dedicated researcher in the field,” he said.
Myerson’s colleagues were not surprised he won the Nobel – it was only a question of when, they said.
“The truth of the matter is that most of us believed sooner or later that he was going to get the Nobel,” Jacobs said.
But Myerson’s dedication spans further than his research. Jacobs said he thought one of Myerson’s greatest accomplishments was learning how to teach during his time at NU.
“He worked at it very hard because, frankly, he cared,” he said.
Myerson agreed that learning how to teach was one of his biggest accomplishments at NU. He said it took him a long time to master, but when his students excelled at the “difficult mathematical topics,” he felt they could become “successful business decision makers.”
What he taught wasn’t the only complex thing Myerson was involved with; his research isn’t simple either.
Kamien compared mechanism design theory to the American pharmaceutical services industry. He said a lot of money is spent on non-survival products, such as hair restorers and Viagra, while some portions of the population suffer from fatal diseases that are often unacknowledged because profits on medicines to address those issues would be much smaller.
Myerson’s research devised a way to structure the economy to care for some of those people who do not typically receive the assistance they need, he said.
Reach Emily Glazer at
