W. Brian Arthur
Dr. W. Brian Arthur is a noted economist from Belfast, Northern Ireland, living and working in Northern California for many years. He is a sought-after speaker on economics and complexity theory in technology markets and other applications. Presently, he is on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Visiting Researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab at PARC.
Arthur is noted for his seminal works studying the impacts of positive feedbacks or increasing returns in economies, and how these increasing returns magnify small, random occurrences in the market place. These principles are especially significant in technology-specific industries.
His concepts on increasing returns were utilized during the during the antitrust case brought by the United States Department of Justice against Microsoft.[1]1
Santa Fe Institute
Dr. Arthur is one of the distinguished External Research Faculty members at the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Arthur's long association with the Institute started in 1987 with the introduction and support of Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Arthur was named as the first director of the now renowned interdisciplinary Economics Program at the Institute beginning in 1988. He was named the Citibank Professor at the Institute in 1994, with the endowment of Citibank and then-CEO John S. Reed.[2]
He has served several terms on the Science Board, 1988-2006, and Board of Trustees, 1994-2004, during his association with the Institute.
Academic Career
Dr. Arthur is the former Dean and Virginia Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies; Professor of Human Biology, Stanford University, 1983-1996. He is the co-founder of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies at Stanford.
Education
Dr. Arthur received his Ph.D. in Operations Research (1973) and an M. A. in Economics (1973) from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned an M. A. in Mathematics at the University of Michigan (1969). At Lancaster University, England, he received an M. A. in Operational Research (1967). As an undergraduate, Arthur received his B. Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Queens University Belfast (1966).
Awards and Honors
Dr. Arthur was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 for his work on increasing returns, followed by winning the Schumpeter Prize in Economics award in 1990.
He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Economic Sciences degree from the National University of Ireland (2000)
At age 37, Dr. Arthur was the youngest endowed chair holder at Stanford University.
He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, World Economic Forum, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Complexity Theory
Arthur is one of the early researchers in the emerging complexity field. Specifically, his complexity studies focused on the "economics of high technology; how business evolves in an era of high technology; cognition in the economy; and financial markets."[3]
Arthur's comments on the evolution of complexity theory as a different way of seeing and conducting scientific inquiry:
Complexity theory is really a movement of the sciences. Standard sciences tend to see the world as mechanistic. That sort of science puts things under a finer and finer microscope. In biology the investigations go from classifying organisms to functions of organisms, then organs themselves, then cells, and then organelles, right down to protein and enzymes, metabolic pathways, and DNA. This is finer and finer reductionist thinking.
The movement that started complexity looks in the other direction. It’s asking, how do things assemble themselves? How do patterns emerge from these interacting elements? Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It’s important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They’re open-ended. In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to. Science doesn’t like perpetual novelty.[4]
Publications
Books:
- The Nature of Technology: What it Is and How it Evolves. The Free Press, 2007 and Penguin Press, 2007.
- "The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II", edited with Steven Durlauf and David Lane, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, Series in the Sciences of Complexity, 1997
- Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994
Selected Papers:
- Complexity and the Economy, Science, 2 April 1999, 284, 107-109.
- The End of Certainty in Economics, Talk delivered at the conference Einstein Meets Magritte, Free University of Brussels, 1994. Appeared in Einstein Meets Magritte, D. Aerts, J. Broekaert, E. Mathijs, eds. 1999, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Holland. Reprinted in The Biology of Business, J.H. Clippinger, ed., 1999, Jossey-Bass Publishers.
- Positive Feedbacks in the Economy, Scientific American, February 1990.
- Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns and Lock-in by Historical Events, Economic Journal, 99, 106-131,1989.
- Increasing Returns and the New World of Business, Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1996.
- Bounded Rationality and Inductive Behavior (the El Farol Problem), American Economic Review, 84,406-411, 1994.
- Complexity in Economic and Financial Markets, Complexity, 1, 20-25, 1995.
- Preface to the book: Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, Univ. of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994.
- Process and Emergence in the Economy, introduction to the book The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II, edited by Arthur, Durlauf, and Lane, Addison Wesley, Reading, Mass, 1997.
- Cognition: The Black Box of Economics, The Complexity Vision and the Teaching of Economics, David Colander, ed., Edward Elgar Publishing, Northampton, Mass, 2000.
- Myths and Realities of the High-Tech Economy, Talk given at Credit Suisse First Boston Thought Leader Forum, Sep 10, 2000.
References
- ^ "Short Background: Brian Arthur". Santa Fe Institute. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
- ^ "Coming from Your Inner Self, Conversation with W. Brian Arthur, Xerox PARC, April 16, 1999, by Joseph Jaworski, Gary Jusela, C. Otto Scharmer". [Dialog on Leadership]. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
- ^ "Short Background: Brian Arthur". Santa Fe Institute. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
- ^ "Coming from Your Inner Self, Conversation with W. Brian Arthur, Xerox PARC, April 16, 1999, by Joseph Jaworski, Gary Jusela, C. Otto Scharmer". [Dialog on Leadership]. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
External Links
- W. Brian Arthur, External Research Faculty, Santa Fe Institute
- Interview with W. Brian Arthur, by Michael Mauboussin, Legg Mason Capital Management, September 26, 2006
- Growth in the Hi-Tech Economy: Keynotes by W. Brian Arthur: via Leigh Bureau
- Legg Mason Thought Leader Forum 2004, Dr. Arthur's remarks plus mind-mapped notes.
- CIOs: Transforming the Corporate Landscape, Not Just IT, CIO Magazine, July 15, 2003
- An Interview With W. Brian Arthur Strategy+Business, Joel Kurtzman, Editor-in-Chief, Second Quarter 1998
- 1The Force of an Idea, John Cassidy, New Yorker, January 12, 1998 (Discusses Arthur's increased returns impact on Microsoft antitrust case.)
- Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy by W. Brian Arthur and Foreword by Kenneth J. Arrow. University of Michigan Press.
- Increasing Returns and the New World of Business, W. Brian Arthur, Harvard Business Review July-August, 1996.
- Innocentive: Crowdsourcing Diversity, Assignment Zero/Wired (magazine), a crowdsourcing interview with Innocentive founder Alpheus Bingham discussing Dr. Arthur's works in combinatorics. July 2007.
- Rapid Networking is Key in New Economy, Albuquerque Tribune, June 25, 2007.
- NetLogo modeling and simulation of Arthur's El Farol problem