Leonid Hurwicz


This text is adapted from “Leonid Hurwicz’s Game”, by Ann Bauer. Reprinted with permission from the author and Twin Cities Business magazine.

Professor Hurwicz says that he is simply a product of his history. He knows from experience how circumstances change when people don’t abide by the rules of the game.

“I cannot tell you my life story and what I did without telling you about politics as well,” Hurwicz says.

Leonid Hurwicz was born in Moscow on August 21, 1917 after the Kirensky revolution but before the October Bolshevik revolution. In early 1919, he and his family returned to Warsaw − his father’s home; his mother was also Polish − after the Communists came to power in Russia. “My father was convinced, I think rightly, that if he stayed in Russia, he would have trouble with Lenin,” Hurwicz says. “Of course, that’s not my memory; I was 14 months old. But I know we traveled in various imperfect ways, such as horse-drawn wagon, to arrive in Poland.”

His father was a lawyer, with a degree from the Sorbonne in Paris. In Warsaw a five-year internship was required to practice law, so he taught history while completing that. Hurwicz’s mother was a teacher as well, but after the move she stayed home with him and his younger brother, giving them lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Hurwicz didn’t begin formal schooling until the age of nine, when he started at a private institution attended and staffed mostly by Jews.


“I experienced harassment during this period.” Hurwicz pauses, as if remembering. “But I never was beaten or attacked personally. And with my professors, I felt no discrimination.”

He graduated from Warsaw University in 1938 with a degree in law, originally intending to follow in his father’s footsteps. However, beginning in his second year of law school, he’d taken some obligatory economics courses and became more interested in this discipline than any other.

“I had the belief that many troubles you could observe on the European continent were due to politicians not understanding economic phenomena,” Hurwicz says. “Even if they had good intentions, they didn’t have the skills to solve problems.”

Hitler was in power in Germany and Jews all across Eastern Europe were on guard − made to feel like intruders in their own countries, hearing hideous rumors about persecution they could not fathom but nevertheless feared. Hurwicz’s father, sensing the changing tides, suggested that his older son apply to the London School of Economics rather than set up a law practice at home.

Leo went to London in the fall of ’38, but in the Spring of ’39 the British refused to extend his visa. So Hurwicz went to France and then Switzerland on a transit visa. He arrived in Bern in August of 1939 − less than a week before Germany attacked and occupied western Poland, including Warsaw. Hurwicz heard the news, but didn’t know that his parents and brother had managed to escape to Russian occupied eastern Poland. By the spring of 1940, they had been arrested and taken to a labor camp in Arctic European Russia. He spent months in Geneva, enrolled part time as a student, living off what little money he had left, and hoping for news of his family.

Hurwicz contacted his cousins in Chicago, whom his parents had told him would help if he needed to leave. In 1940, 23 years old and all alone in the world but for some cousins he’d never met who wired money and an address, Hurwicz booked passage on an Italian boat.

“In a month − no less − Mussolini joined Hitler,” Hurwicz recalls. His ticket was now worthless because no Italian ship could enter American ports. “That was bad luck for me, because there was the question of how to get my money back. Also, even if I had money, how did I travel from Switzerland to some city which was not on Hitler’s side and could get me to America?”

He found a way. An airline opened briefly between Switzerland and Barcelona, both neutral cities. Hurwicz was able to fly to Spain and take a train to Madrid, then Lisbon. He spent almost two months in the Portuguese city of Estoril which was “like Monte Carlo,” tutoring the children of wealthy Spanish and French families vacationing there. Then Hurwicz got word of a Greek boat, the Nea Hellas, sailing for New Jersey.

Leo needed help getting his money back from the Italian company, so he went to the harbormaster who said “What can I do?”. Leo suggested that the harbormaster could threaten to take the company’s license away, and that if he didn’t succeed, he would have Hurwicz on his hands for the duration of the war. The harbormaster followed Leo’s suggestion. With a refund and the little he had earned tutoring, Hurwicz booked passage on the Greek boat.



Again, world events dictated his course.




“When you talk about the economic process of a society, sometimes we separate it into two stories,” Hurwicz says. “One is about monetary variables. But then, we very often assume the underlying arrangement, the other variable, is ‘perfect competition,’ which means people do whatever they are supposed to do. But actually, there is usually some chapter, not too long, which tells you there are different mechanisms that operate in a particular economy… My question was, What other systems or mechanisms or variables are possible?”


“The way I describe it is, there are two kinds of games in economics,” Hurwicz says. “One is the game where people use only legal moves. Then there is the true game, the one like real life, where the strategies and moves people make, some of them contain illegal gains. So you take into account when you write the rules of the game that the players will try to cheat.”

That’s the basis of “mechanism design,” for which Hurwicz (pronounced “HER-witch”), a University of Minnesota regents professor emeritus of economics, won the 2007 Memorial Prize in economics. Too frail to make the trip to Sweden, Hurwicz received the award from the Swedish ambassador to the United States in the university’s Ted Mann Concert Hall on December 10, 2007.


Here’s a simplified example from Hurwicz’s work. An old coal-burning energy plant is spewing pollutants. In the not-so-distant past, the response would be for a government regulator to simply demand that the utility reduce emissions or be shut down. But there are problems with this approach. It might not be a simple matter to cut emissions − the cost may be prohibitively high. Or the owner may try to finesse the “game” by hiring an attorney who knows ways to keep the issue bottled up in court. He may also have influence with local legislators, who don’t want to lose the jobs (and electricity) the plant produces.

Mechanism design shows how to attain more efficient outcomes while taking into account the two sides’ different motivations. One possible scheme: A “cap-and-trade” system that creates financial incentives to reduce emissions by assigning a cost to polluting. The government establishes a cap to limit emissions. The emissions allowed under the new cap are then divided up into individual permits that give producers the right to emit that amount. Companies are free to buy and sell these permits. Those who can reduce emissions at a low cost do so, then sell their permits at a profit to companies that continue to pollute. Those high polluters thus have an incentive to reduce their own emissions.

In this case, mechanism design uses government regulation to create a market solution when the market, on its own, doesn’t work very well. Such Hurwicz-inspired mechanisms may be useful in creating innovative solutions to some of the thorniest problems in public policy − reducing the inequities in the U.S. health care system, or regulating the ever-expanding telecom industry.

Mechanism design builds on game theory, which arose in the 1940s as a mathematical means of studying various interactions, including business negotiations and transactions. According to game theory, each “player” in an exchange will choose a strategy to better his own position based on the strategies that he believes others will employ. (Think of a blind auction: How do you bid on something so that you win the item but don’t pay too much for it?)


“Leo’s research provided a way to categorize all the outcomes that are achievable in different economic settings,” says Narayana Kocherlakota, chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota. “He understood that people might not abide by the rules and thought about all the possible games and arrangements and policies that could result. The way economists worldwide think through problems is heavily influenced by Leo’s thinking even today.”

Mechanism design is commonly used now to set up transactional strategies. For individual consumers, one of the most familiar and recognizable examples is the open auction, where potential buyers and sellers determine how valuable an item is and set the best price based on all of the players knowing what’s being bid. But the same principles are at work in other situations − the federal government’s auction approach to selling cell phone bandwidth, for instance.

Hurwicz translated the lessons of oppression into a now global belief system that is equal parts economics and philosophy, and that helps solve specific problems in the real world. Among the many things he’s learned: People can rise above their self-interest.

Hurwicz’s drew his 2007 Prize lecture from his 1988 paper entitled “But Who Will Guard the Guardians?,” where he wrote: “Somewhere at a finite end in the chain of guardians, there may be guardians (individual or collective) who are in sympathy with the rule (game-form) that makes certain behavior illegal, e.g., whose ethical standards rule out corrupt behavior, and who have the ability (through power, financial assets, personal charisma or status, combined with the population’s respect for it), as well as the inclination to act so as to discourage improper behavior of the guardians of lower order.”

He describes how, in a truly democratic society, corrupt politicians can be halted by concerned and selfless individuals − he calls them “intervenors” − who act to right the system. The same is true, Hurwicz postulates, in business, where a handful of righteous individuals can rebalance an equation thrown off kilter by dishonest peers.

“Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings,” proclaimed Elie Wiesel, who was interned at Auschwitz during World War II and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, “hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.”




Leonid Hurwicz died on June 24, 2008.

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 2007

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