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Get a copy of the Martin Shubik memorial booklet

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Get a copy of the Martin Shubik memorial booklet

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If anyone would like a copy of the booklet of remembrances that was distributed at Martin's memorial event in March, please email Ben Mattison at the Yale School of Management at ben.mattison@yale.edu.

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I offer a lengthy rationalization and an apologia pro vita sua for dreaming up, playing, experimenting with, and theorizing about games in various applications.

References

Arthur, W.B. (1994). Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy Ann Arbor Michigan. University of Michigan Press.
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Huber, J., Shubik, M., Sunder, S. (2010a). An economy with personal currency: Theory and experimental evidence. Annals of Finance, 6, 475-509.
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Shubik, M. (1997). On the trail of a White Whale: The rationalizations of a mathematical institutional economist. In Heertje, A. (Ed.), The makers of modern economics (Vol. 3, pp. 96-121). London, UK: Edward Elgar.
Google Scholar

Shubik, M., Levitan, R. E. (1980). Market structure and behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Shubik, M., Smith, D. E. (2005). Strategic freedom, constraint and symmetry in one-period markets with cash and credit payment. Economic Theory, 25, 513-551.
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Shubik, M., Sudderth, W. (2011). Cost innovation: Schumpeter and equilibrium. Part 1. Robinson Crusoe. Unpublished manuscript. Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper 1786. New Haven, CT, USA.
Google Scholar

Shubik, M., Whitt, W. (1973). Fiat money in an economy with one nondurable good and no credit (A noncooperative sequential game). In Blaquiere, A. (Ed.), Topics in differential games (pp. 401-448). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.
Google Scholar

Whitt, W. (1975). Stationary equilibria in an economy with money, uncertainty, infinitely many time periods and a continuum of traders. Unpublished manuscript, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Google Scholar

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On the Trail of a White Whale: Sequel - Martin Shubik, 2013

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I offer a lengthy rationalization and an apologia pro vita sua for dreaming up, playing, experimenting with, and theorizing about games in various applications. References Arthur, W.B. (1994). Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy Ann Arbor Michigan. University of Michigan Press. Google Scholar Huber, J., Shubik, M., Sunder, S.

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by Pradeep Dubey

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Martin was a large part of my life for the summer of 2018. I was put in contact with him through a friend of a friend, and have been thankful ever since. He was such a bright part of each day I spent with him. He was always so positive, even in his darkest times. He is what got me through this last summer. As a brilliant economist, what surprised me the most about Martin was how poetically he saw life. A project we worked on towards the end of the summer was cataloguing his poetry, and it truly touched me to see how beautiful his mind really was. This is a passage from one of his poems "Sweeney Agonistes Revisited":

"There is always the beauty of extreme abstraction. The seamlessness of the life it portrays kills all motion with a dynamics where all variety vanishes. Stock blends with flow. In the peace of the continuous infinity the individual particles vanish; one is left without the sweat of crowds or the haze of clouds.  Time and information neither aid nor harm yesterday’s tomorrow."

Martin has truly impacted my life, and in such a short span of time. I cannot imagine what kind of an impact he has had on others. He will be missed, but he most definitely will be remembered.

Daniel Rock

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I first met Professor Martin Shubik (Martin) at the convent of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in 1990. On learning that my background involved investing in start-up technology companies, Martin introduced himself and I had the great pleasure and honor of knowing Martin for twenty-nine years. Our relationship first centered around SFI where I was a Trustee and Martin served with distinction on the Science Board. For five plus years we were also members of the Economics Committee that along with esteemed members such as Martin, Professors Kenneth Arrow, Brian Arthur, Murray Gell-Mann, Marcus Feldman, and Herb Anderson among others. Although I had quickly formed a strong impression of Martin’s intellect and unbounded work ethic, it was in observing how respected he was by this group of his peers, that I came to understand how important he was to the field of economics, and to his field of mathematical institutional economics, that he truly was. The number of books, papers and letters that he wrote is truly astonishing.

Martin was insistent on investing along with me when I found a raw start-up. For as long as he lived, he supported management even when the company struggled through out the many years. Only later in 2019 was the company to be sold and the investors, including Martin and the family and friends who he brought in as investors, will earn a very modest return. He could not have been a better investor and was respected by everyone. Unfortunately he did not get to experience the fruit of his labors.

I will miss our engaging conversations, his sense of humor, desire to start an insurance museum, his wit, intelligence, and curiosity. Whatever honors Martin earned or will earn they could never be enough to truly honor a great intellect and human being. I should also add Martin never treated me as anyone but a friend.

I loved Martin and he is already missed.

Sincerely

James Pelkey

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We met in your vegetable garden, made from you seeing a time-vitamin link.

You spoke of your process research on time differences missed in economic theorising.

1st a buyer gives money,

2nd a seller gives goods:

no strict simultaneity in exchange.

You pointed out where this links into my dual non strict simultaneity discoveries in

a) risk/economics– that risk entails an anticipated change in knowledge ahead, and

b) physics – that calculus object movements are not strictly simultaneous.

May your timing acuity continue through your co-authors, and these point me to where your publications on this for me also to contribute to continuing it.

May you and Julie live on through vitamin gardens, and us with whom you shared thoughts.

Robin Pope

Discoverer of contradiction-free including anticipated risk effects by eliminating un-noticed contradictions in Neumann-Morgenstern’s axioms and in Savage Theory and Decision, 1985 18, 229-261

An Australian living in Bonn Germany

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Martin with Imelda and Michael Powers (April, 2001)

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I met Martin Shubik in 1987 as an undergraduate at Yale and since then he became a teacher, advisor, co-author, friend and an intellectual father of mine. I shared wonderful academic and personal moments with Martin, Julie, and Claire. His sanguine humour, his chef-level cooking, broad knowledge and understanding, and his innate pedagogical nature accompanied every stage of my undergraduate, graduate, and academic career.

Often times, his inchoate ideas did not make any sense at first; however as time progressed his analytical depth and far-reaching intellectual power permeated any discussion. He would subject any argument to the “distance test” between assumptions and conclusions, and he would dislike tautologies and assertions. His students were most important to him and he would always follow their career development. The last time I saw him during the past April, he first asked what I was working on and whether I had compromised my intellectual values in my research!

As a humble sign of appreciation for all that Martin has so amply offered us, I, hereby, submit the first page of his article that was just published in the “Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Central Banking”.

Martin was a remarkable intellectual, a dedicated teacher and above all a decent human being.

Shalom Julie and Martin,

Dimitri Tsomocos (B.A., M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale)

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Tsomocos, Shubik chapter in Siklos   book

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When I was a postdoc I was so impressed with Shapley and Shubik's work that I named our two cats Lloyd and Martin!  Little did I know at that time, that I would end up a co-author with Shubik.  Over the years, Martin the Cat and Martin the Human met several times -- I think they liked each other!  Here's a photo of the two of them taken in Reno in early 1997.
--Tom Quint--

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We first met Martin many years ago when he and Julie came to London to visit his sister Irene. We knew of course of his distinguished academic career and appreciated his care and concern for Irene. We remained in touch ever since and were privileged to be included on his email list, receiving a regular supply of jokes and wise comments, now much missed....

Anna and Joseph Horovitz

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In 1972, I was a student in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. Curious about rational decisionmaking, I enrolled in Professor Shubik’s course on game theory. It was obvious that he liked having a non-YSM student in his class. One assignment was participating in a computer-simulated market. I played many times and, unlike my YSM classmates, I was always ruined very quickly. Intending to console and encourage me, Professor Shubik made a kind remark about the difference between theory and practice.

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Martin Shubik was my thesis advisor during the 1980s.  I fondly recall our first discussions of game theory, in which he offered a seemingly endless list of open problems for my consideration.  From the beginning, it was clear that his primary interest waselucidating the fundamental, “playable” nature of social, political, and financial interactions.  A few years after graduation, I began working in the reinsurance industry, and Martin adopted my husband, Michael (an insurance regulator turned business-school professor), as a research partner.  Together, theydeveloped basic models of insurance-market structures, and Michael took inspiration from Martin’s intense concern for institutional realities.

Over the years, we were fortunate to have had many opportunities to visit Martin and Julie at their home, first in New Haven (while daughter Claire was still attending the Foote School) and later in Branford (where our sons, Thomas and Andrew, played by the water).  In 2012, we began working overseas, but continued our friendship and collaboration through email and regular video chats.  Shortly before he passed away, Martin called us in Beijing.  Although his voice was strong and clear, we knew it likely would be our last conversation with him, and greatly appreciated his thinking of us.

Martin always showed genuine interest in our family’s life – our jobs, our children, and our experiences living in other countries.Looking back over the years, I frequently recall the humor in his resonant voice as he employed one of his favorite expressions:

“Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.”

“Amusingly enough, ….”

“Imelda, neither you nor I am Von Neumann.”

“And the kicker is ….”

Truly, the “kicker” is that my family will remember his breadth of curiosity, humane spirit, and of course … love of Chinese food.  We are grateful to have shared our lives with Julie and Martin Shubik.

Imelda Yeung Powers (Ph.D., 1986)

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An excerpt from dinner remarks at the Yale celebration of Martin's 65th birthday April 19-20, 1991.

Matthew J. Sobel

William E. Umstattd Professor Emeritus of Industrial Economics

Case Western Reserve University

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Martin in Halifax, Canada 1949

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Martin with his older brother, Philippe, in London

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Martin, November 1946

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Martin and his sister, Irene

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Martin, sitting on his mother's lap at the beach.

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Martin, Julie, his sister Irene, and Claire at the beach in Truro

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My Mom, Judy Isaac, always loved when Martin and Julie would come out to California to visit. My Mom enjoys the memory of first meeting Julie and being so happy that Martin had finally found a good woman that will cherish Martin. She also loved the friendship and happiness that Martin brought to Earl's life. Martin used to always say that Marin County, CA is one of the best climates in the USA. Good memories to cherish forever.

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Earl Isaac visiting his best friend Martin Shubik

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Earl Isaac visiting his best friend Martin Shubik

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This pic shows my Dad, Earl Isaac, in his relaxed mood while visiting his best friend on the East Coast. One of my favorites. Thank you for having my Dad out to visit your special spot.

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This pic is of Martin at my Dad's favorite camping spot we like to call Isaacland. So many great inventions were thought of up here. Martin and Earl's minds never stopped and they came up with some new invention every time. They had a list of many inventions thought of by industry that we will cherish forever. We always enjoyed the Shubik's visits to Marin County, California. I know my dad, Earl, always loved visiting his best friend whenever he could get out there. I so wish I could have found a pic of the two together but I guess that would require an interruption of their constant brainstorming.

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At the University of Toronto.

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Martin would often address each class at the end of the term and pass out his Laws.  My classmates and cohort recall Martin's advice daily. Here they are verbatim:

1)  There Is No Daddy.  (If there is one, it's you.  If you don't understand this, then long range planning is not your metier.)

2) What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?  (The importance of this question is not that you have an answer but that you ask it frequently)

3) a) Always Leave A Little On The Table For The Dealer. (Las Vegas version)

3) b) Make Sure That Murphy Has His Drink. (NYC bar version)

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but our lives crossed from America to the UK by email. This related to an issue involving a family member in difficult personal circumstances whom I had known in the UK for a number of years.
What I know from our contact at that time is that Martin showed himself to be a kind and loving person who felt a strong duty to do the right thing, providing emotional and financial support over a long period. He also showed a deep understanding of human nature in a sensitive, non-judgemental and respectful way.
Martin was clearly someone with the highest integrity willing to take responsibility to help others. I feel a real privilege to have had contact with him and a real regret we never met in person.
Peter Richardson UK

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Martin entering the Santa Fe Institute on the occasion of the Institute's 15th Anniversary party. (If memory serves, 1999.)

I recall him passionately rejecting the notion of a utility function, wisecracking that a "hard-earned PhD is a way of doing well without the money it prevents you from earning". He loved science and he loved art - a true Renaissance man.

Walter Fontana

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University of Toronto Varsity Water Polo Team 1946-47

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University of Toronto Varsity Water Polo Team 1946-47

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Martin Shubik, rear right, Goaltender

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Martin Shubik and my late partner, Erik LaMont, were friends for many years.  Some time before I met Martin, he had taken Erik on a mushroom hunt and Erik came home with a bagful. I remembered an experience in the woods near Budapest where I saw a sign that translates as "mushroom-checking station," so I asked Erik if these mushrooms were safe to eat and he answered "if Martin says they are, they are." (I feel like I'm writing this to Julia, because she knew Erik well enough to know how out-of-character that remark would be!) Of course, the mushrooms were not only edible, they were delicious and they afforded me a unique introduction to Martin Shubik, a man of so many interests and accomplishments.  Martin and Julia were special people and I will always miss their friendship.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

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I met Martin Shubik during the early 2000ths at Santa Fe Institute. I immediately liked his process-oriented understanding of economics. Martin and Julie several times offered me hospitality at their houses in New Haven and on Cape Cod, where we tried to unwind some of these economics processes into models that one could simulate.  He was certainly one of the persons who gave me orientation both for my personal and for my professional life.  Strangely enough, I don't seem to have a photo of my own of him, so I attach a photo from bitter cold New England on the last day I saw him in person (in 2009).  Kai Nagel

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A remembrance from Nora Wiedenbach, Martin's longtime assistant at the Cowles Foundation

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A remembrance from Nora Wiedenbach, Martin's longtime assistant at the Cowles Foundation

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Martin with AI pioneer John McCarthy (left) and economist Lloyd Shapley (right) at Princeton

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Martin's famous study of the pastrami and corned beef of New York delis, written with Albert Madansky of the University of Chicago and published in the University of Chicago Magazine in 1976.

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The Present and Future of Game Theory by M. Shubik:  

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The Present and Future of Game Theory by M. Shubik:  

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Singapore Econ Rev 2012
YouTube Video, and PPT 2010

Martin's Autobiography:  Simulation & Gaming 2013

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Julie, Pingye, Martin, and Jingang (PhD 92), late 1990 at 80 Howe St #608, New Haven

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Julie, Pingye, Martin, and Jingang Zhao (PhD 92), late 1990 at 80 Howe St #608, New Haven

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Pickering College 1943 Voyageur yearbook

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Pickering College 1943 Voyageur yearbook

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The Polikon Club with Martin Shubik. Joe McCulley, Headmaster

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Pickering College alumnus Martin Shubik '43 was the Class of 1842 award recipient in 1986.

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Pickering College alumnus Martin Shubik '43 was the Class of 1842 award recipient in 1986.

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The Class of 1842" is a group of individuals who are honoured, recognized and appreciated by Pickering    College for their service, achievement, or for their contribution to education. This is the highest honour that the school awards to Pickering's alumni, former faculty, or staff who have distinguished themselves nationally or internationally.
https://www.pickeringcollege.on.ca/our-alumni/classof1842

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Pickering College: In 2013 our Pillars magazine published an article about alumnus Martin Shubik '43. We were very proud and fond of him.

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Martin Shubik-Gerard Debreu at the Cowles 50th Anniversary Conference reception - June 1983

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Koopmans-Shubik-Scarf-Brainard-Tobin - Cowles 50th Anniversary Conference - June 1983

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Martin Shubik - Cowles Lunch Talk 4/27/16

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Martin Shubik - Cowles Lunch Talk 4/27/16

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William Brainard, John Geanakoplos, Dirk Bergemann, Martin Shubik - Cowles Lunch Talk 4/27/16

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Martin Shubik - circa 1/30/2008

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Martin Shubik, Manfred Deistler,  and Benedikt Pötscher in 1987.

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From 1966 till 1968, after finishing with a master degree in electrical engineering, I attended a postgraduate program in economics at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna. I still remember very well Martins lecture on game theory there. I was fascinated by Martins deep and broad view of the subject and, last but not least, by him as a human being. Martin invited his students in small groups for dinner in order to discuss a number of relevant issues with them, including theirfuture perspectives.

Together with Ted Hannan and Peter Schönfeld, Martin belonged to the three people which had the strongest influence on the development of my scientific personality. This may sound as a surprise, because I never did work together with Martin, nor did I work on game theory at all. It was Martins deep understanding of economics, as well as his attitude towards scholarship in general, which had this great impact on me. To give just one example, I still remember Martin explaining the difference between a good and an intelligent scientist.

Thank you, Martin

Manfred Deistler

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Martin at about age 15.

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Learn about one of Martin's contributions as a veteran of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, the Wavy Navy.

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The strength of the RCNVR was increased as well with Port Arthur (1937), London (1938) and Windsor (1939) added to bring the Volunteer Reserve to 18 Divisions and nearly 1000 officers and men. In 1937, the Supplementary Reserve, consisting largely of yachtsmen, was attached to the RCNVR and a West Coast Fishermen's Reserve was created.

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From left to right: Jean-François Mertens, Gérard Debreu, Martin Shubik, and Michel Balinski. Taken at Stony Brook University, April
1986.

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Martin with his grandson Elliott, a few days before Martin passed away.

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A conversation with Martin about his life and career for the INFORMS web site. Read more.

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INFORMS History and Traditions Interview with Martin Shubik

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Martin's obituary on the Yale SOM web site.

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Martin Shubik, a profound scholar and cherished colleague and teacher, died on Wednesday, August 22, 2018. Shubik was the Seymour H. Knox Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Institutional Economics and had been on the faculty at Yale since 1963.

Throughout his career, Shubik used the tools of game theory to better understand numerous phenomena of economic and political life.

"Martin Shubik made outstanding and fundamental research contributions to game theory (including cooperative and experimental games), defense analysis, and the theory of money and financial institutions," said Edward Kaplan, a professor at Yale SOM. "With Martin, we are talking about Nobel Prize‐quality research which travels far beyond 'outstanding' to as many superlatives as you can think of."

Shubik was born on March 24, 1926, in Manhattan. His father worked for a British company, and when Shubik was three months old, the family returned to London. "At the age of a few months, I was an international traveler," Shubik told an interviewer in 2017. He attended school in England until he and his sister and mother were sent to Canada during World War II to avoid the bombing. Shubik's father and older brother remained in England to help the war effort.

In a lecture he gave in 2016, Shubik described himself as a perplexing student. He attained top marks in algebra while struggling in geometry. By the time he reached college at the University of Toronto, he was interested in history and the social sciences, but he opted to study mathematics and physics, having the intuition that they would one day prove useful in bringing greater rigor to the social sciences.

Shubik said that his study of physics taught him to think about using mathematical models to describe complex phenomena. His mind sought to examine and formalize the world around him in order to better understand it. He served in the Royal Canadian Navy, and he watched daily routines, such as the boat drill, and wondered whether they were optimal procedures. "I more and more started to see questions that were operations research-like," he said. He pursued a master's degree in political economy at the University of Toronto, where he wrote his thesis on quipos, the knotted strings used as a form of communication and for accounting in the Incan empire. But it was a single assignment in an economic theory course that may have had the greatest influence on Shubik's later career. He chose to write a review of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. "I dived in and by the time I had spent about four or five hours with the book, I was hooked," recalled Shubik. "I said to myself that this is the mathematical way into the social sciences."

Shubik decided to pursue further study in game theory and ended up in the rich intellectual brew of Princeton University in 1950. He studied with Oskar Morgenstern, Albert Tucker, and John von Neumann. His roommates included Lloyd Shapley and John Nash, both of whom later became co-authors. He forged lifelong relationships with other emerging scholars, including Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. In a lecture, Shubik fondly recalled high tea at Fine Hall, the math department at Princeton, where he could mingle with the "luminaries," discussing new ideas and playing Go and Kriegsspiel.

"A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System," a seminal paper coauthored by Shubik and Shapley, came out of this period. Starting with the insight that in a voting system, power is not distributed evenly per vote, since any coalition that accumulates a majority has all the power, the two conceived a model that can be applied to committee systems ranging from legislatures to boards of directors.

"Martin's work in game theory is legendary," said Edward Kaplan, pointing to that early paper as a substantial part of Shubik's legacy. "It introduced the well-known Shapley Shubik Index that became a staple in the study of elections and assembly voting (such as in the United Nations)."

Shubik and Shapley collaborated long after their graduate school days; Shubik's CV lists 12 co-authored papers written over subsequent decades.

After completing his doctorate, Shubik spent four years working for General Electric. The position gave him an opportunity to look into nearly every facet of the economy: "I spent my time as a consultant visiting Richland to check on the atomic energy generation, Phoenix to check on computers, Santa Barbara to check on consulting services, Cincinnati to check on aircraft engines, and so on. I spent much of my time flying and learning how things were done."

Eventually, facing the possibility that he could be promoted to plant manager, Shubik put himself on a path back to research and academia, first stopping at IBM Research Labs and then landing at Yale as a professor of the economics of organization. He remained a fixture at Yale until his death. He was the director of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics from 1973 until 1976, and he was one of the founding faculty of the Yale School of Management (then the School of Organization and Management). He taught courses in economics, game theory, and investment theory and practice. He was named the Seymour H. Knox Professor of Mathematical Institutional Economics in 1975 and held that chair through his retirement in 2007.

"Retirement" made little difference in Shubik's research output; he went on publishing papers on economics, defense, and other topics. His CV lists 22 books and 340 articles, including some that are still forthcoming.

Scholars in many fields count Shubik as an inspiration and a collaborator. Christopher S. Tang PhD '85, a professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, wrote a letter supporting Shubik's nomination to be a fellow of INFORMS, the association for operations research and analytics professionals. "His research contributions to game theory are superb and easily merit the Fellow designation, but the same could be said separately for his work on defense analysis, and on military gaming," Tang wrote. "[H]is overall body of work is so innovative, penetrating, and voluminous that it has had enduring effects on research, education, and practice."

One of Shubik's most influential books has been Game Theory in the Social Sciences, the first volume of which received the Lanchester Prize in 1983. It could be seen as the realization of his early instinct that mathematics would prove essential to social science, and it has pointed the way for legions of others. In another letter supporting Shubik's nomination to be an INFORMS fellow, Matthew J. Sobel, a professor at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, called it one of the most important books about game theory published in the last half century. Summing up Shubik's contributions to the field, Sobel wrote, "It is apt to compare Shubik's contributions to game theory with those of Richard Bellman to dynamic programming. Both made seminal contributions to the underlying theory in their respective domains, and both indefatigably wrote about a vast array of contexts in which the respective theories yielded important insights."

Paul Bracken, professor of management at Yale SOM, said that Shubik's work applying gaming and game theory to defense policy helped turn the whole field toward a more rigorous approach. "Prior to his work, gaming was pretty much an intuitive field driven by gut instincts," Bracken said. "DoD's gaming is now conducted at a much higher level of usefulness because of Martin's work." Shubik's work "stands in a class of its own," Bracken said, and has influenced numerous areas of defense analysis. For instance, in a 1971 paper, Shubik devised a dollar auction game in which players would end up spurring each other to bid far more than one dollar in order to win a dollar. The logic of escalation clearly applies to a number of issues in defense strategy. "Vietnam, limited nuclear war with the Soviets, and other examples took on a new light in this perspective," said Bracken.

Shubik's longtime Yale SOM colleague Shyam Sunder described what may have been Shubik's greatest intellectual preoccupation: "Until the end, Martin Shubik explored money and the institutions societies create to make it serve human ends. Money-the most concrete yet the most ephemeral of objects of value-occupied his theorizing, gaming, teaching, and investing."

In a series of papers about this effort, Shubik alluded to the theory of money as his white whale-a subject he pursued tirelessly over many decades. (It is characteristic of his self-deprecating humor that he chose to implicitly compare himself with the doomed Captain Ahab.) Like Melville's whale, the theory of money as conceived by Shubik is an enormous and possibly all-encompassing subject. It could help explain the development of markets and institutions such as credit, bankruptcy, and the corporation. Shubik wrote, "The construction of a viable theory of money and financial institutions calls for the assembly of a vast jigsaw puzzle of interrelated aspects of the physical economy and its financial control by synthetic legal persons known as corporations acting as fiduciaries for their ultimate owners, the legal natural persons."

Shubik coined the term "mathematical institutional economics" to describe his approach to understanding the economy. "[T]o me it meant that in considering process one needed to clothe abstraction in the richness and relevance of institutional detail," he wrote. He sought a model that could incorporate the processes and behaviors of the real economy while retaining some of the predictive power of theory.

After many years of frustration, Shubik found his way into a solution by analyzing an n-player game where each player holds one good. He created an additional commodity that the players could exchange and realized this functioned as money. He recalled telling his wife Julie, "This is Alice through the looking glass. I have just got through the looking glass. The mechanisms and institutions are all going to come out like unwinding a sweater."

The result was a series of papers and books, many of them written with collaborators, looking at many facets of the economy. Starting in 1999, Shubik published the three volumes of The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions. And in 2016, he published The Guidance of an Enterprise Economy, which he said "more or less finished" his theory of money. He had caught his white whale.

Sunder published several papers with Shubik in this period. He said, "When I arrived at Yale in 1999, his interest in gaming and mine in experimental economics brought us together." Noting that their last joint paper, on efficiency of financing public goods by democratically chosen tax regime, was published in 2018, Sunder added, "His mind remained sharp and clear until the evening before he left us."

John Geanakoplos, a Yale professor of economics, said that Shubik was a mentor and a role model as a scholar. "When I started at Yale, Martin immediately took me under his wing, offering to write papers with me and giving me advice about how to live as a scholar and simultaneously a participant in the world. I am deeply grateful for that," said Geanakoplos.

At the end of his life, Shubik retained the qualities that had made him such a valued colleague. "In the last few days of his life, when he knew time was short, when he was on morphine and in pain and having trouble breathing, he spent hours talking to me about research, focusing on problems he felt he had not solved," said Geanakoplos. Though Shubik had started his economics studies in the postwar years, his mind was looking to the future. "One unsolved puzzle that Martin and I talked about at the end was how to cope with a world in which capacity constraints had moved out and increasing returns to scale were inexorably leading to bigger and bigger firms like Amazon, blurring the distinction between capitalism and socialism. He was convinced that lifetime working hours inevitably would fall and be partly replaced by more education, rendering universities more important than ever."

Shubik received numerous awards throughout his life. He is one of very few researchers to have won both the Koopman Prize for military operations research and the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences from INFORMS, a combination that reflects the diversity of his interests. He was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economics Association in 2010. The citation recognized "contributions to a variety of fields in economics." He was also a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and will be named a fellow of INFORMS later this year.

Throughout his long career, Shubik retained an interest in practice, whether that meant advising corporations, government ministries, or military agencies. He coauthored a book called The Aggressive Conservative Investor with Martin J. Whitman, a longtime friend from Princeton, and served for many years as a director of Whitman's Third Avenue Fund.

"Martin is one of the few academics I know who could translate academic theories into real-world actions," said Stanley Garstka, a professor at Yale SOM. "The contents of this book were the building blocks of the Third Avenue Value Funds which for many years Whitman chaired and Martin was an independent director. The two taught together, in Yale College and SOM classrooms, courses on value investing and distress investing for over a decade. Many successful Yale College and School of Management alumni can trace the roots of their successes to the Shubik-Whitman class."

Ed Hirs '81, YC '79 took several classes with Shubik, starting as an undergraduate, and maintained a lifelong relationship with him. "Martin epitomized the Yale SOM mission of leadership in society and business," said Hirs. "His wide-ranging academic research in game theory and financial institutions was applied to the real world via his work-even into his 90s-with the OECD, directorship of Third Avenue Funds with his friend and SOM colleague Marty Whitman, and 60-plus years of advising the Department of Defense." Hirs recalls Shubik as a teacher who kept practical applications at the forefront and challenged his students on many levels, while making classes engaging with his "droll, puckish sense of humor."

Among his friends and family, Shubik was known as an excellent cook and lover of food, art, and humor. Shubik's roommate at Princeton, J. K. Lee, introduced Shubik to Chinese cooking, which became a serious and lifelong hobby. A dedicated friend, Shubik remained closely connected to friends from every period of his life and continued to add friends till the end.

Shubik was equally dedicated to his family. He is survived by his wife Julie Shubik, who was closely by his side for 50 years; his sister, the pioneering television producer Irene Shubik; his daughter Claire Shubik-Richards, for whom he was a singularly important influence; his son-in-law, economist Seth Richards-Shubik; grandsons Elliott and Leopold Shubik-Richards; and his niece Anna Shubik Sweeney and her family. Shubik was predeceased by his older brother, Oxford toxicologist Philippe Shubik.

In the last years of his life, Shubik suffered from Inclusion Body Myositis, which causes progressive weakness in the muscles. His response was characteristically rigorous: he organized a campaign to gather information about the disease, which grew into the Inclusion Body Myositis Disease Registry at Yale, now the world's largest systematic categorization of the epidemiology, natural history, and clinical care of Inclusion Body Myositis. Article number 333 on his long CV is "Demographic and Clinical Features of Inclusion Body Myositis," a paper co-authored with David Paltiel '85, a professor of public health and management at Yale.

Paltiel recalled, "Martin felt strongly that patients could contribute to medical and scientific progress by organizing themselves and assembling/analyzing self-reported data... Even as recently as last Friday, he was sending out updates on his health status, in the hope that they might prove useful to future generations of patients, providers, and researchers."

"A good business school should be turning out individuals who are highly sensitive to the fact that good standards, honest laws, lack of corruption, consistency in treatment are vital to decent societies and decent economies."

Martin Shubik talked about the power and limitations of markets in a 2007 Yale Insights interview.

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Remembering Prof. Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

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Martin Shubik, a profound scholar and cherished colleague and teacher, died on Wednesday, August 22, 2018. Shubik was the Seymour H. Knox Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Institutional Economics and had been on the faculty at Yale since 1963. Throughout his career, Shubik used the tools of game theory to better understand numerous phenomena of economic and political life.