Hervé Moulin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1950 (age 74–75) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Université Paris-DauphineÉcole Normale Supérieure |
| Doctoral advisor | Jean-Pierre Aubin |
| Influences | Marquis de Condorcet,Jean-Charles de Borda,John von Neumann |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Game theory,fair division,social choice,mathematical economics |
| Institutions | University of Glasgow |
| Doctoral students | Josue Ortega |
| Notable ideas | Random assignment, cost sharing, dominance solvable games |
| Awards | Fellow of theEconometric Society, Council Member of the Game Theory Society, President of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare |
| Website | |
Hervé MoulinFRSE FBA (born 1950 inParis) is a French mathematician who is the Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at theAdam Smith Business School at theUniversity of Glasgow.[1] He is known for his research contributions inmathematical economics, in particular in the fields ofmechanism design,social choice,game theory andfair division.[2][3][4] He has written five books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles.[5][6][7]
Moulin was the George A. Peterkin Professor of Economics atRice University (from 1999 to 2013):,[2] the James B. Duke Professor of Economics atDuke University (from 1989 to 1999),[2][8] the University Distinguished Professor atVirginia Tech (from 1987 to 1989),[9] and Academic Supervisor atHigher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia (from 2015 to 2022).[10][11] He is a fellow of theEconometric Society since 1983,[12] and the president of the Game Theory Society for the term 2016 - 2018.[13][14] He also served as president of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare for the period of 1998 to 1999.[15] He became a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Edinburgh in 2015.[16]
Moulin's research has been supported in part by seven grants from the USNational Science Foundation.[17] He collaborates as an adviser with the fair division website Spliddit, created byAriel Procaccia.[18] On the occasion of his 65th birthday, theParis School of Economics and theAix-Marseille University organised a conference in his honor, withPeyton Young, William Thomson, Salvador Barbera, and Moulin himself among the speakers.[19]
Moulin obtained his undergraduate degree from theÉcole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1971[20] and his doctoral degree in Mathematics at theUniversity of Paris-IX in 1975[21] with a thesis on zero-sum games, which was published in French at the Mémoires de la Société Mathématique de France[22][23] and in English in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and its Applications.[24]
On 1979, he published a seminal paper inEconometrica introducing the notion of dominance solvable games.[25] Dominance solvability is a solution concept for games which is based on an iterated procedure of deletion of dominated strategies by all participants. Dominance solvability is a stronger concept thanNash equilibrium because it does not require ex-ante coordination. Its only requirement is iterated common knowledge of rationality. His work on this concept was mentioned inEric Maskin's Nobel Prize Lecture.[26]
One year later he proved an interesting result concerning the famousGibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem,[27] which states that any voting procedure on the universal domain of preferences whose range contains more than two alternatives is either dictatorial or manipulable. Moulin proved that it is possible to define non-dictatorial and non-manipulable social choice functions in the restricted domain of single-peaked preferences, i.e. those in which there is a unique best option, and other options are better as they are closer to the favorite one. Moreover, he provided a characterization of such rules.[28] This paper inspired a whole literature on achieving strategy-proofness and fairness (even in a weak form as non-dictatorial schemes) on restricted domains of preferences.[29][30]
Moulin is also known for his seminal work incost sharing[4][31][32] and assignment problems.[33][34] In particular, jointly withAnna Bogomolnaia, he proposed theprobabilistic-serial procedure as a solution to thefair random assignment problem, which consists of dividing several goods among a number of persons. Probabilistic serial allows each person to "eat" her favorite shares, hence defining a probabilistic outcome. It always produces an outcome which is unambiguously efficient ex-ante, and thus has a strong claim over the popularrandom priority. The paper was published in 2001 in theJournal of Economic Theory. By summer of 2016, the article had 395 citations.[35]
He has been credited as the first proposer of the famous beauty contest game, also known as the guessing game, which shows that players fail to anticipate strategic behavior from other players. Experiments testing the equilibrium prediction of this game started the field of experimental economics.[36]
In July 2018 Moulin was elected Fellow of theBritish Academy (FBA).[37]
Moulin has published work jointly withMatthew O. Jackson,[38]Scott Shenker,[39] andAnna Bogomolnaia,[40] among many other academics.
