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Leading Game-Theory Expert and Alumnus to Speak Friday
Richard McKelvey
OCTOBER 3, 2000--Richard McKelvey '66, one of the nation's leading game theorists, will return to campus this Friday to deliver "Game Theory, Mistakes, and Social Science" at 4:30 P.M. in the Hallock Auditorium of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies.
McKelvey is the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology. His talk is sponsored by the economics department and the Alumni Association.
He also will talk with students and faculty about research in the social sciences and be available to discuss the 3-2 Oberlin-Cal Tech program. McKelvey helped develop the program, which enables students to spend their first three years at Oberlin and the next two at Cal Tech, graduating with a B.A. from Oberlin and a B.S. in engineering from the engineering school.
"McKelvey has made important scholarly contributions to almost every discipline within the social sciences--political science, sociology, and economics as well as philosophy and social choice, management science, conflict resolution, and statistics," says Hirschel Kasper, Oberlin professor of economics.
For the past decade he has made extensive use of experimental data. Many of his 80 or so articles take a game-theoretic approach to understand behavior. "An Experimental Study of Jury Decisions," published recently in the American Political Science Review, for example, analyzes how juries make decisions.
A Cal Tech faculty member since 1978, McKelvey received a B.A. degree in mathematics from Oberlin in 1966, an M.A. in mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1967, an M.A. in political science from the University of Rochester in 1970, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester in 1971.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences named him a fellow in 1992; he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences 1993 and a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1994.
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