Nationality American Name Stephen Morris Institution Princeton University Role Game theorist | Education Yale University (1991) Contributions global games Fields Economics, Game theory | |
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Alma mater Cambridge University and Yale University Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences, US & Canada | ||
School or tradition Neoclassical economics | ||
Stephen Edward Morris is an economic theorist and game theorist especially known for his research in the field of global games. In 2007 he became the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He is the editor of Econometrica for the period 2007–2011.
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Biography
Morris obtained a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics at Cambridge University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Economics at Yale University in 1991. He became an Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and an Associate Professor in 1996. In 1998 he moved to Yale as a full professor. In 2005 he became the Irving Fisher Professor of Economics at Yale. He moved to Princeton University in 2005, where he became the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics in 2007.
Morris is the founding editor of the BEPress Journals of Theoretical Economics and the editor of Econometrica for the period 2007–2011.
Morris is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 2002 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. He obtained the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2005–2006.
Research contribution
Global coordination games belong to a subfield of game theory which gained momentum with the article by Morris and Shin (1998). Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin considered a stylized currency crises model, in which traders observe the relevant fundamentals with small noise, and show that this leads to the selection of a unique equilibrium. This result is in stark contrast with models of complete information, which feature multiple equilibria.
Morris has also made important contributions to the theory of mechanism design. In his work with Dirk Bergemann on robust mechanism design they relaxed common knowledge assumptions which were prevalent in the early mechanism design literature. By formulating the mechanism design problem more precisely, they showed that simple mechanisms arise endogeneously. This provided a theoretical justification for the relatively simple auction design employed in practice, when compared to the complexity of optimal auctions suggested by the early literature.