Game Theorist Kreps Elected to Academy

In April David Kreps, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Economics, became the third GSB faculty member elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, a private organization established in 1863 by Congress and signed into existence by Abraham Lincoln. Membership in the academy is considered one of the highest honors a scientist or engineer can receive.
Kreps is known primarily for his work in noncooperative game theory and especially for the notion of a sequential equi librium, which he developed with his colleague Robert Wilson, the Atholl McBean Professor of Economics. (Wilson and James March, the Jack Steele Parker Professor of International Management, Emeritus, are the GSB's other academy members.) In 1989, Kreps was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, presented biennially to a single American economist under 40 who has made contributions of the highest distinction to economic thought and knowledge. Honored then particularly for his work in modeling competitive interactions using game theory, he noted that game theory "is increasingly the mode of analysis in all sorts of economics. You see it in industrial organization, labor economics, international trade, and policy-oriented macroeconomics." Recently, Kreps has been working on various aspects of dynamic choice, emphasizing bounded rationality, adaptive learning, and social influences on tastes and beliefs. Kreps, PhD '75, is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Gsb Marketing Professor Itamar Simonson was honored twice this year for the impact of his research on the field of marketing. Simonson was presented with the 1997 O'Dell Award for "Choice in Context: Tradeoff Contrast and Extremeness Aversion," which was the ar-ticle published in the Journal of Marketing Research judged to have had the largest impact during the five years following publication. In it, Simonson and his coauthor, the late Amos Tversky of Stanford's psychology department, demonstrated how a set of product or service options affects the preferences and choices of consumers. [See June 1994, Volume 62/Number 4 ] Simonson received his second award for "Trademark Infringement from the Customer Perspective: Conceptual Analysis and Measurement Implications," deemed the best article in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing between 1993 and 1995. Here Simonson explored such issues as how one determines if two trademarks are likely to be confused and when a trademark becomes a generic term, both subjects with significant public policy, marketing, and legal implications.
Another Award for long-range scholarly contribution went to William Barnett, associate professor of strategic management and organizational behavior, and Charles O'Reilly, the Frank E. Buck Professor of Human Resources Management and Organizational Behavior. Their paper "Work Group Demography, Social Integration, and Turn-over," published in Adminstrative Science Quarterly in 1989, was judged to have had the greatest impact on the field over the following five years.
Two Architects Of The New MBA Core curriculum moved to the dean's office this month. Margaret Neale, professor of organizational behavior, and David Brady, the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor, joined Robert Flanagan as associate deans for academic affairs. In her two years at the Business School, Neale has created and directed three executive education programs: "Negotiation and Influence Strategies," "Managing in Groups and Teams," and "Advanced Negotiation." Brady, who has been at Stanford for the past 10 years, has been actively involved in the Public Management Program and was faculty director of executive education last year. Neale and Brady will share faculty oversight with Flanagan. Brady, who will also focus on implementation of the new core over the next year, will continue to be responsible for executive education.
In 1985, General Electric Found itself the operator of two of the nation's top research labs. GE was spending over $3 billion annually on its own research facility when, as part of its agreement to purchase RCA, it also became owner of the David Sarnoff Research Center.
"Simply combining them made absolutely no business sense," recalled General Electric CEO Jack Welch. There was some debate over shutting the Sarnoff facility down when Welch received a visit from William F. Miller, then president of SRI International, the Menlo Park-based think tank.
"Bill had tenacity, vision, and guts. And he quickly convinced us that he had a plan that would work," said Welch.
Miller, professor of public and private management, who rejoined the Business School faculty in 1990 after leaving SRI, convinced both Welch and the leaders of the Sarnoff facility that it could prosper as a for-profit institution. "Bill Miller was a real hero in this," Welch said.
In April, Miller and Welch were among four men to receive the Sarnoff Founders' Medal during the facility's 10th anniversary celebration.

PHOTOGRAPH BY KIM STRINGFELLOW

David Kreps added yet another honor to his list of awards when he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.