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Historical Faculty

Kenneth Arrow

Joan Kenney Professor of Economics
Professor of Operations Research, Emeritus

(1921 – 2017)

Kenneth Arrow is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who taught in what is now the Department of Management Science and Engineering.

He got his start in operations research, and was one of the first economists to note the existence of a learning curve. He has shown that under certain conditions an economy reaches a general equilibrium.

In 1972, together with Sir John Hicks, he won the Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.

Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor Emeritus of Operations Research (now part of Management Science and Engineering). Arrow has served on the economics faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard University and Stanford.

He has received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He received a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York, and master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University.