Jack Hirshleifer (1925–2005) was Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University and served as an economist at RAND Corporation and taught at the University of Chicago.
A founding father of information economics, bioeconomics, and the economics of conflict resolution, he helped develop fundamental tools, such as the covariance of risks, the analysis of gambling and insurance, the Modigliani-Miller Theorem, and the analysis of public investment. His work on the private and social value of information clearly shows that competitive markets need not reflect the social value of information.
Professor Hirshleifer was a Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Econometric Society, and in 2000 was elected Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. He also served as President of the Western Economic Association and Vice President of the American Economic Association.
His books include Price Theory and Applications; Water Supply: Economics, Technology, and Policy; The Analytics of Uncertainty and Information; and The Dark Side of the Force: Economic Foundations of Conflict Theory, and his many scholarly articles appeared in such journals as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, and Quarterly Journal of Economics.
