Leonid Hurwicz Quotes

4 Sourced Quotes

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 issued 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
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
My work in thus 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
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