Nobel Prize Economists

Part 1.

It was September 1964. I was at MIT. A leave from Wesleyan and an NSF grant funded my time there.

I was at lunch at a round table with Paul Samuelson (one of the first economists, maybe the second to earn a Nobel Prize in economics), Bob Solow (won a Nobel Prize in Economics) and seven others. I was sitting next to Bob.

The discussion involved the outbreak of the Vietnamese war. I whispered to Bob that I had just resigned my commission in the Naval Reserve. He whispered back, "That may have been the best decision you ever made."

Part 2.

I know Bob remembered me, but didn't know Paul remembered me until we were at the funeral for Jim Tobin (a Yale professor who also won a Nobel Prize).

There was Bob and Paul and a bunch of others; Samuelson saw me, stuttered for a few seconds, then said my name. 

Part 3.

There was a German economist, Rinehart Selten, who had written an article using game theory summarized as "four is few and six is many," meaning if you have four major players in an industry then tacit collusion is possible but if you have six then that's too many players for tacit collusion: competitive rivalry and price come out.  That sounded akin to something empirical that I had written. I was the only one to use both the four firm concentration ratio and the marginal eight firm concentration ratio in my regressions. My work revealed a nice, neat negative sign to the marginal concentration ratio that was statistically significant. So when I read about his article, I sent Selten a reprint of my article and a letter with a comment, "You may not know it, but I've done some empirical work that's similar to your theoretical work." He wrote me back, "Don't you think I didn't know your work?" and enclosed a reprint of another article of his which was providing a theoretical underpinning based on game theory for my empirical result. He was confirming what I had done. I have been very pleased with that ever since.