Matthew O. Jackson
Matthew Owen Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a fellow of CIFAR. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1988. Jackson has been honored with the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the B.E.Press Arrow Prize for Senior Economists, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has served as co-editor of Games and Economic Behavior, the Review of Economic Design, and Econometrica. Jackson co-teaches a popular game theory course on Coursera.org, along with Kevin Leyton-Brown and Yoav Shoham.
Jackson’s research concerns game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks. In his popular non-technical book The Human Network he discusses how a handful of simple and quantifiable features of human networks yield enormous insight into why we behave the way we do. Two threads are interwoven: why human networks have special features, and how those features determine our power, opinions, opportunities, behaviors, and accomplishments. Some of the topics included are: which systematic errors we make when forming opinions based on what we learn from our friends; how financial contagions work and why are they different from the spread of a flu; how splits in our social networks feed inequality, immobility, and polarization; and how network patterns of trade and globalization are changing international conflict and wars.
