| 1 | Name: | Dr. Herbert Eli Scarf | |
| Institution: | Yale University | ||
| Year Elected: | 1993 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 302. Economics | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1930 | ||
| Death Date: | November 15, 2015 | ||
Herbert E. Scarf was the Sterling Professor of Economics Emeritus at Yale University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1963. Scarf’s most enduring legacy was an algorithm - named for him - that enables economists to evaluate how markets, companies and even households would respond to fundamental changes in tax policy or trade strategies. He received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1954 and was employed at the RAND Corporation from 1954-56. In 1956 he was asked by Professors Kenneth J. Arrow and Samuel Karlin to join them at Stanford University to collaborate in the development of inventory theory. Dr. Scarf remained at Stanford until 1963, continuing to work on inventory theory and extending his interests to more general problems in mathematical economics. Over the years, he had been concerned with a variety of different applications of mathematics to economic theory, studying optimal policies for dynamic inventory problems, the stability of the classical model of economic equilibrium, the development of numerical algorithms for computing equilibrium prices and the relations between economic equilibria and cooperative n-person game theory. For a number of years, he concentrated on the detailed analysis of production in which indivisibilities (e.g., large, discrete choices) play an important role. His underlying motivation had been to incorporate into equilibrium analysis a treatment of large firms, whose size derives from the presence of economics of scale in production. Dr. Scarf was a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and has served as Director of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University; as Director of the Division of Social Sciences at Yale; and as the President of the Econometric Society. The recipient of an Honorary Degree from the University of Chicago, he won the Lanchester Prize and the von Neumann Medal of the Operations Research Society of America and was a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. Herbert Scarf died November 15, 2015, at the age of 85, at his home in Sag Harbor, New York. | |||