Roger Myerson, the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the academy announced Tuesday.
He was one 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 15 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Myerson was awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was recognized for his contributions to mechanism design theory, initiated by co-winner Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota, and which Myerson further developed with others, including co-winner Eric Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Myerson has made seminal contributions to the fields of economics and political science. In game theory he introduced a refinement of Nash's equilibrium concept, called "proper equilibrium." He has applied game theoretic tools to political science to study and compare electoral systems, and he also developed fundamental ideas of mechanism design, such as the revelation principle and "revenue-equivalence theorem."
Myerson also has developed computer software for auditing formulas and for simulation and decision analysis for use with Microsoft spreadsheet software.
He is the author of Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (1991) and Probability Models for Economic Decisions (2005). Myerson also has published numerous articles in Econometrica, Mathematics of Operations Research and the International Journal of Game Theory, for which he served as an editorial board member for 10 years.
During his 25-year tenure at Northwestern University, Myerson twice served as a Visiting Professor in Economics at Chicago. He joined the Chicago faculty in 2001.
He received his A.B., summa cum laude, and S.M. in applied mathematics in 1973 from Harvard University and a Ph.D., also in applied mathematics, from Harvard University in 1976.
The election was held this morning during the business session of the 146th annual meeting of the Academy. Those elected today bring the total number of active members to 2,150. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States. Tuesday'ss election brings the total number of foreign associates to 404.
The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln that calls on the Academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.
Additional information about the Academy and its members is available online at http://www.nasonline.org.
