Matthew O. Jackson
Stanford University
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Primary Section: 54, Economic Sciences Secondary Section: 53, Social and Political Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2015)
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Biosketch
Matthew O. Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. He was at Northwestern University and Caltech before joining Stanford, and received his BA from Princeton University in 1984 and PhD from Stanford in 1988. Jackson's research interests include game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks, on which he has published many articles and the books `The Human Network' and `Social and Economic Networks'. He also teaches an online course on networks and co-teaches two others on game theory. Jackson is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Game Theory Society Fellow, and an Economic Theory Fellow, and his other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the von Neumann Award from Rajk Laszlo College, an honorary doctorate from Aix-Marseille University, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize from the Toulouse School of Economics, the B.E.Press Arrow Prize for Senior Economists, and teaching awards. He has served on the editorial boards of Econometrica, Games and Economic Behavior, PNAS, the Review of Economic Design, and as the President of the Game Theory Society.
Research Interests
I am very interested in the functioning of social and economic networks. Much of my recent research has concerned how social structure impacts opinions, opportunities and behaviors. This includes studies of social learning, the diffusion of information, as well as people’s access to job opportunities, decisions to pursue education, and adoption of new technologies. In addition, I have done extensive studies on the formation of networks, from theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives, ranging from studying what drives racial biases in high school friendships, to the determination of who interacts with whom in rural Indian villages and how that affects how information diffuses within those villages. The emphasis of my research has been devoted to understanding the welfare implications of both the formation of networks and how they constrain opportunities and information flows. I have also done extensive studies in the areas of political economy and game theory. Some of the topics I have studied there include: when and why nations go to war, which voting systems and markets best align individual incentives with societal well-being, and how social norms evolve in a society.
