Jacob Marshak

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Jacob Marschak (born July 23, 1898 in Kiev , Russian Empire ; died July 27, 1977 in Los Angeles , USA ) was an American economist .

Marschak, together with Roy Radner, is considered to be the founder of the economic theory of teams and organizations (team theory ). Further work concentrates on the analysis of approximately rational decisions by economic actors as well as on the theoretical analysis of information and communication costs between actors in decision-making processes.

Life

Jacob Marschak (still Jakob until 1933) was born the son of a jeweler. Since he was not allowed to attend the grammar school as a Jew, he attended the commercial high school in Kiev. In 1915 he began his studies at the University of Technology and Commerce in Kiev, among others with Yevgeny Evgenyevich Sluzki . In the revolutionary environment of Russia he became a member of the social democratic party . He was arrested in December 1916 for his activities as a socialist and pacifist , but released three months later after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II . In the late autumn of 1917 Marshak went to the troubled region of the northern Caucasus , where he held the post of labor minister of the short-lived Soviet republic of Terek from March to July 1918 . In the same autumn Marschak went back to Kiev, but emigrated to Berlin in early 1919. In the context of the Spartacus uprising , he began studying economics at Berlin University. After one semester, he broke off his studies in Berlin to devote himself to the social sciences at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg under Emil Lederer , Alfred Weber and Karl Jaspers . There he received his doctorate in autumn 1922 with the dissertation The traffic equation , in which his interest in the problems and motives of holding money, taking into account uncertainty and information for the economic behavior of actors is expressed.

From 1922 to 1926 he worked as a business journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung and then as a consultant for economic policy for the General German Trade Union Federation. In 1928 he switched to the newly established economic research department of the Kiel Institute for Shipping and World Economy , where he was entrusted with studies for the economic survey .

His attempt to enroll for a habilitation at the University of Kiel in 1930 failed due to resistance from the economics faculty. As a result, he went back to Heidelberg and completed his habilitation there until 1933 at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität with the work Elasticity of Demand, which had already been written in Kiel : For the empirical determination of relative market constants by observing the household, business and market . Marschak fled to Vienna in the spring of 1933 even before the Baden Ministry of Education and Culture canceled his teaching post in the course of the Nazi seizure of power . After brief research stays in Spain and the Netherlands , he accepted a call to Oxford University in autumn 1933 . There he became the first director of the newly founded Oxford Institute of Statistics in 1935 , which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation because of its focus on business cycle research . In the same year he lost his German citizenship, which he had only received in 1929. So at the end of 1938 he was able to easily accept a travel grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to the USA , which was to become his third and last home after Germany.

In the autumn of 1939, Marschak left Oxford for good and accepted an offer from the New School for Social Research and succeeded Gerhard Colm as chairman . In January 1943 he followed the call to the University of Chicago and was also director of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics . The Cowles Commission quickly gained international recognition for its research on the modeling of simultaneous systems of equations and the probabilistic approach to econometrics. Until 1955, its staff included Tjalling Koopmans (1948–54 director), Trygve Haavelmo , Kenneth Arrow , Gérard Debreu , Lawrence Klein , Harry Markowitz , Franco Modigliani and Herbert A. Simon . After James Tobin became the new director in 1955, Marschak moved to Yale University in New Haven , Connecticut, along with many other economists on the commission . In 1960 Marschak changed one last time and followed the call of the University of California in Los Angeles , where he retired in 1965 and was director of the Western Management Science Institute until 1969 .

As elected President of the American Economic Association in 1977, he prepared the annual meeting at which he would take office for the presidency in 1978. This did not happen, however, because Marschak died of a heart attack on July 27, 1977 . He was succeeded by Tjalling C. Koopmans .

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • The wage discussion , Mohr, Tübingen 1930.
  • Elasticity of demand. For the empirical determination of relative market constants through observation of household, business and market , Mohr, Tübingen 1931.
  • Income, employment, and the price level , Kelley, New York 1951.
  • Optimal symbol treatment: a problem in business and economics , Hanstein, Bonn 1970.
  • (together with Roy Radner): Economic theory of teams , Yale University Press, New Haven 1972, ISBN 0-300-01279-9 .
  • Economic information, decision, and prediction. Selected essays , three volumes, Reidel, Dordrecht 1974, ISBN 90-277-0524-0 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Krohn: Marschak, Jacob
  2. ^ Past and Present Officers. aeaweb.org ( American Economic Association ), accessed October 28, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Marshak, Jacob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Marshak, Jakob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist
DATE OF BIRTH July 23, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiev
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1977
Place of death los Angeles