Bill Sandholm in Memoriam
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Bill Sandholm in Memoriam Larry Samuelson1 · Jörgen Weibull2 Published online: 11 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
William H. Sandholm, 1970–2020 As were so many others, we were very saddened to hear that William “Bill” Sandholm passed away on July 6, 2020, at the all-too-young age of 49. Bill was an excellent and insightful researcher, an inspiring colleague, and a trusted friend. Bill graduated from Dartmouth College in 1992, with a major in Economics, and received his Ph.D. from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Economics in 1998. He joined the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin that fall, and spent the next 22 years at Wisconsin, rising to become the Richard E. Stockwell Professor of Economics. In the process, he became a fixture in the economic theory and game theory communities. He served on the editorial boards of Dynamic Games and Applications, Games and Economic Behavior, the International Journal of Game Theory, the Journal of Dynamics and Games, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Economic Theory, Mathematics
* Jörgen Weibull [email protected] 1
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
2
Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden
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of Operations Research, and Theoretical Economics. He served on several National Science Foundation panels. He was a member of the Council of the Game Theory Society. He was tireless as an unselfish meeting organizer and referee. Bill had a wide range of interests—he was as interested in Dostoyevsky as in Dedekind, and as comfortable with Cartesian philosophy as with Cartesian coordinates—but his focus was on evolutionary game theory. Bill pursued his interest in evolutionary game theory with a wide range of coauthors, to whom we apologize for not mentioning in the text, trusting readers to refer to the following bibliography. Three main themes appear in Bill’s research: (1) the application of evolutionary game theory to implementation problems in economics, (2) the convergence of behavior in evolutionary game theory, and (3) the micro foundations of evolutionary dynamics. On the first theme Bill was a pioneer. In a series of papers (“Evolutionary Implementation and Congestion Pricing” (Review of Economic Studies, 2002), “Negative Externalities and Evolutionary Implementation” (Review of Economic Studies, 2005), and “Pigouvian Pricing and Stochastic Evolutionary Implementation” (Journal of Economic Theory, 2007), Bill provided a general framework demonstrating how a benevolent government can use simple pricing schemes to ensure efficient behavior in implementation problems with hidden information and hidden actions. The key to this analysis is the notion of evolutionary implementation, invented by Bill for this purpose. Evolutionary implementation is a strong form of the requirement that players who follow a reasonable and quite general myopic adjustment process eventually learn to behave as the planner desires. I
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