Peyton Young

Hobart Peyton Young, called Peyton Young, ( born March 9, 1945 in Evanston ( Illinois)) is an American mathematician and economist who deals with game theory.

Young graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1966 and was in 1970 a PhD from the University of Michigan at Thomas Frederick Storer ( Equicardinal matroids and matroid designs) .. In 1971 he became associate professor at the City University of New York. 1976 to 1981 he was at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg and 1982 Professor of Economics and Political Science ( Public Policy ) at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1994 he became a professor at Johns Hopkins University and from 2007 he was the James Meade Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford.

He is a foreign member of the Santa Fe Institute and a senior fellow of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics at the Brookings Institution.

He dealt with evolutionary game theory, in which he in 1990 with the concept of stochastic stability Dean Foster introduced (stochastic evolutionary game theory), with applications in social dynamics ( development of social norms and institutions ) and economics. Another focus of his research are learning in game theory and choice theory, some with Michel Balinski (impossibility set of Balinski and Young).

He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Econometric Society (1975). In 1976 he was awarded the Lester Randolph Ford Award.

Writings

• Michel Balinski: Fair Representation, 2nd edition, Brookings Institution, Washington DC 2001
• Strategic Learning and Its Limits, Oxford University Press, 2004
• Individual Strategy and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions, Princeton University Press, 1998
• Equity: In Theory and Practice, Princeton University Press 1994

Some essays:

• With Dean Foster: Learning, Hypothesis Testing, and Nash Equilibrium, Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 45, 2003, pp. 73-96
• The Evolution of Conventions, Econometrica, Vol 61, 1993, pp. 57-84.
• An Evolutionary Model of Bargaining, Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 59, 1993, pp. 145-168.
• With Dean P. Foster: Stochastic Evolutionary Game Dynamics, Theoretical Population Biology, Volume 38, 1990, pp. 219-232
• With Bary SR Pradelski: Learning Efficient Nash Equilibria in Distributed Systems, Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 75, 2012, pp. 882-897.
• Innovation Diffusion in Heterogeneous Populations: Contagion, Social Influence and Social Learning, American Economic Review, Volume 99, 2009, pp. 1899-1924.
• Learning by trial and error, Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 65, 2009, pp. 626-643.
• With Dean Foster: On the Impossibility of Predicting the Behavior of Rational Agents, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Vol 98, 2001, pp. 12848-12853.
• With Mary A. Burke: Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois Agriculture, American Economic Review, Volume 91, 2001, pp. 559-573.