Information Markets

John O.Ledyard is the Alan and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Economics and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he has been teaching since 1986. Previous positions include Northwestern University, where he was the Sydney G. Harris Professor of Social Science, and Carnegie Mellon University. He holds an AB degree in Mathematics from Wabash College and an MS and PhD, both in economics, from Purdue University. At Caltech, he was a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar (1977-78) and later chairman of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (1992-2002).

Professor Ledyard's long list of honorary distinctions and service to the profession includes fellowships in the Econometric Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Public Choice Society and an honorary degree from Purdue University. He has served on several editorial boards of economics and public choice journals, on advisory committees to the National Science Foundation and other organizations, and as president of the Public Choice Society (1980-82).

Professor Ledyard has done pioneering work on the theoretical foundations and the applications of theoretical and mechanism design, and he has contributed greatly to our understanding of the roles of incentives and information in organizations. His more applied work includes the development of computer-assisted markets for trading pollution rights, managing resources for spacecraft and instrument design, acquiring logistics contracts, swapping portfolios of thinly traded securities, and decision markets. An author of more than 60scientific articles, his papers have been published in leading journals in economics, social choice, political science, law, mathematics and statistics.