Andy Whinston

I first knew about Andy Whinston in an accounting class of the MSIE program of the Krannert School in my first year as PhD student at Purdue, back in 1973. In one footnote, the text book referenced a paper with the title “Price guidelines in decentralized organizations” (A. Whinston "Price Guides in Decentralized Organizations," New Perspectives in Organization Research, (Cooper, Leavitt and Shelley, 1964), pp. 423-427) and at that time my general academic interest was about what is different between firms and markets as mechanisms for resource allocation. From the title of the article, it appeared that the price system that worked in markets could also work within firms so maybe there were not much differences between the two. Shortly after, I knew that Andy was a professor at Krannert and took his course in game theory, where we got to know better and at the end of the course Andy kindly accepted being my thesis advisor. The topic he suggested for my dissertation was integrating artificial intelligence in economic research. I surveyed the literature on IA and attended a course on the topic at the Engineering School. However, I early realized that I was not prepared for the challenge and redirected the research towards my original academic interests. The title of my PhD thesis was “Theory and Models in Non-Market Resource Allocation”. Since then, my main teaching and research interests have been around organizational economics.

I consider myself very fortunate to have had the possibility of working with Andy, and learning from his excellence in combining in a rigorous and relevant way knowledge from economics, management, decision sciences at the same time. And I consider very fortunate of having been honored by his friendship and of his closest family, Veronika, Juliette and Stephen. I would have very much liked being in Austin to thank Andy personally for his magistery and friendship, as I did in the previous conference twenty years ago. Unfortunately, it has not been possible.

I congratulate all the people that has taken the initiative of organizing the conference to honor Andy and I warmly endorse the praises to his professional and personal life that will be pronounced during the conference and ceremonies. Andy, we all own you a lot and you and your family have to be very proud for your own achievements and for the achievements of your students and the students of your students.

With warm regards
Vicente Salas Fumás
PhD Management Science 1976

source: https://p.web.umkc.edu/Pickr/andy/