2002 JEA NAKAHARA PRIZE: ANNOUNCEMENT

By KAZUO NISHIMURA Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University

The JEA (Japanese Economic Association)–Nakahara Prize was initiated in 1995 and is funded by a donation from Mr Nobuyuki Nakahara. The Prize was established to honour economists under the age of 45 who have achieved internationally recognized research.

It is my pleasure to announce that the 2002 JEA–Nakahara Prize has been awarded to Professor Michihiro Kandori. Born in 1959, he took his BA from Tokyo University in 1982 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1989. At present, he is Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo. Professor Kandori has made several important contributions to the theories of repeated games and evolutionary games. He has shown that random elements in adjustment process can provide powerful equilibrium selection in the long run, even in games where traditional refinement concepts have no bite in reducing the number of equilibria. He also extended the theory of repeated games and enhanced the applicability of the folk theorem by considering the case where players change their partners over time. Moreover, he provided a positive answer for a long-standing open question in the field, namely, the possibility of cooperation in repeated games where players receive imperfect private information about the past history.

Professor Kandori's major contributions include the following:

Social Norms and Community Enforcement”, Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 59 (1), No. 198 (1992), pp. 63–80.

“Learning, Mutation and Long Run Equilibria in Games”, Econometrica, Vol. 61, No. 1 (1993), pp. 29–56 (with George Mailath and Rafael Rob).

“Evolution of Equilibria in the Long Run: A General Theory and Applications”, Journal of Economic Theory, Vol. 65, No. 2 (1995), pp. 383–414 (with Rafael Rob).

“Evolutionary Game Theory in Economics”, in Advances in Economics and Econometrics, Vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 243–277.

“Private Observation, Communication and Collusion”, Econometrica, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1998), pp. 627–652 (with Hitoshi Matsushima).

“Randomization, Communication, and Efficiency in Repeated Games with Imperfect Public Monitoring”, forthcoming in Econometrica.

Selection Committee

Kazuo Nishimura, Kyoto University (Chairman)
Jean-Michel Grandmont, CREST-CNRS
Tatsuo Hatta, University of Tokyo
Cheng Hsiao, University of Southern California
Dale Jorgenson, Harvard University
Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara (2000 President), University of Tokyo

Hiroshi Yoshikawa, University of Tokyo