Lloyd S. Shapley
1923 – 2016
Photograph: Konrad Jacobs / Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, Lloyd Shapley (1980), CC BY-SA 2.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons. Shown toned. File and licence
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The problem on the desk
What is a game worth when today’s joint actions change tomorrow’s position? Shapley studied finite stochastic games with a positive chance of stopping at each position, proving existence of a value and stationary optimal strategies.1
A life in moments
- 1923
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Born on 2 June.2
- 1953
Princeton University · Princeton
Completed his doctorate under Albert Tucker.2
- 1953
Princeton University · Princeton
Published Stochastic Games.3
- 1981
University of California, Los Angeles · Los Angeles
Joined the university after his RAND career.2
- 2012
Shared the economics prize with Alvin Roth for stable allocations and market design.4
- 2016
Died on 12 March.2
Every line rests on a dated source (numbered below) unless it carries a mark: R for an inference, S for a story as told.
In their own words
the play proceeds by steps from position to position
A story
Stopping made an infinite horizon manageable
The 1953 model allows arbitrarily many moves, but a positive stopping chance at every position bounds continuation. That feature supports Shapley’s contraction argument.1
Around Shapley
- communicated the paper John von Neumann Von Neumann communicated Shapley’s stochastic-games paper to PNAS on 17 July 1953.6
Recorded as advisor Albert William Tucker Recorded as students Manel Baucells, Mario Rui Pascoa, Cheng-Zhong Qin Mathematics Genealogy Project record
The genealogy lists only what the database records; a missing name is not a missing teacher.
The card in the book
Mathematician and game theorist. He received his doctorate from Princeton in 1953 under Albert W. Tucker, worked at the RAND Corporation from 1954 to 1981 and then at the University of California, Los Angeles. He introduced stochastic games and the value iteration for their discounted and stopping versions, the value for cooperative games that bears his name, and, with David Gale, the stable-matching algorithm; his 1964 example showed that fictitious play need not converge outside the zero-sum world. He shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Alvin Roth for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design — not for any of the results used in this chapter.
Main works “Stochastic games” (PNAS 39, 1953); “A value for -person games” (1953); “College admissions and the stability of marriage”, with D. Gale (American Mathematical Monthly 69, 1962); “Some topics in two-person games” (1964).
To read further
- Lloyd S. Shapley, Mathematics and Economics: Los Angeles, University of California Academic Senate · institutional memorial
Sources (6)
- Stochastic Games, Lloyd S. Shapley, 1953; pp. 1095–1097
- Lloyd S. Shapley, Mathematics and Economics: Los Angeles, University of California Academic Senate; In Memoriam; education, appointments and research
- Stochastic Games, Lloyd S. Shapley, 1953; p. 1095, affiliation and date
- The Prize in Economic Sciences 2012: Press release, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2012; 15 October 2012; stable allocations and market design
- Stochastic Games, Lloyd S. Shapley, 1953; p. 1095; excerpt
- Stochastic Games, Lloyd S. Shapley, 1953; p. 1095
The facts on this page were gathered for the site from the sources listed, each checked against its locator; the book's card is reproduced unchanged.