The 2024 Hurwicz Workshop on Mechanism Design Theory is a continuation of the initiative started in 2009 to hold a biennial conference in honour of the 2007 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics, a native of Warsaw, Professor Leonid Hurwicz.
Leonid Hurwicz lived in Warsaw until 1938 and studied at the University of Warsaw. He frequently visited Poland in the 1990s. In 1994, he was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) by SGH Warsaw School of Economics. A special plaque commemorates his connection with SGH Warsaw School of Economics.
Hurwicz is often credited with introducing a rigorous mathematical approach to economic analysis. He received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2007 for his fundamental contributions to the theory of economic mechanism design. The theory of mechanism design relies heavily on mathematical methods, including functional analysis, differential equations, differential topology, and dynamical systems. Hurwicz made significant contributions not only to economics but also to mathematics, particularly in the field of nonlinear programming.
Soon after Leo Hurwicz received his Nobel Prize in Economics, a group of researchers, including Prof. Łukasz Stettner, Prof. Aleksander Strasburger, Prof. Tomasz Szapiro, Prof. Jan Werner, and Prof. Tomasz Żylicz, initiated a collaborative effort to organize a conference in his honor. This initiative was jointly undertaken by the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Collegium of Economic Analysis at the Warsaw School of Economics, and the Faculty of Applied Informatics and Mathematics at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. Below, you may find some photos and a poster from the first Hurwicz Workshop in 2009 as well as from 2018.
The first Hurwicz Memorial Lectures were presented by Stefan Rolewicz (PAN) in 2009. The following ones were presented by Eric Maskin (Harvard) in 2010, Roger Myerson (Chicago) in 2011, Ramon Marimon (EUI Florence) in 2012, Martin Hellwig (Max Planck Institute) in 2014, Walter Trockel (Bielefeld University) in 2016, Fernando Vega-Redondo (Bocconi University) in 2018 and Rabah Amir (University of Iowa) in 2022.