caption repec_prefix birth_place awards image_size ethnicity nationality field institution birth_date residence image article_title name alma_mater
herbert scarf e philadelphia , pennsylvania john von neumann theory prize -lrb- 1983 -rrb- 300 px jewish american economics , mathematics yale university 25 july 1930 u.s. herbert-scarf-yale . png herbert scarf
 herbert eli scarf princeton university temple university
herbert scarf

herbert eli scarf -lrb- born on july 25 , 1930 in philadelphia , pa -rrb- is a distinguished american economist and sterling professor -lrb- emeritus as of 2010 -rrb- of economics at yale university .
he is a member of the american academy of arts and sciences , the national academy of sciences and the american philosophical society .
he served as the president of the econometric society in 1983 .
he received both the frederick lanchester award in 1973 and the john von neumann medal in 1983 from the operations research society of america and was elected as a distinguished fellow of the american economic association in 1991 .
scarf never received formal training in economics .
both his undergraduate training at temple university and his graduate work at princeton university were in mathematics .
for the past five decades , however , he has worked at the frontiers of both economic theory and operations research and has made a number of extraordinarily significant contributions to both of these fields .
he is internationally famous for his early epoch-making work on optimal inventory policies and his highly influential study with andrew clark on optimal policies for a multi-echelon inventory problem , which initiated the important and flourishing field of supply chain management .
equally , he has gained world recognition for his classic study on the stability of the walrasian price adjustment processes , his fundamental analysis -lrb- with gerard debreu -rrb- on the relation between the core and the set of competitive equilibria -lrb- the so-called edgeworth conjecture , named after the irish economist , francis ysidro edgeworth , feb 8 , 1845 -- feb 13 , 1926 -rrb- , his remarkable sufficient condition -lrb- i.e. , balancedness -rrb- for the existence of a core in non-transferable utility games and general exchange economies , his seminal paper with lloyd shapley on housing markets , and his pioneering study on increasing returns and models of production in the presence of indivisibilities .
all in all , however , the name of scarf is always remembered as a synonym for the computation of economic equilibria and fixed points .
in the early 1960s he invented a path-breaking technique for computing equilibrium prices .
this method is nowadays known as scarf 's algorithm and has made general equilibrium theory applicable to large , realistic economic problems .
this work has generated a major research field in economics termed applied general equilibrium analysis and a corresponding area in operations research known as simplicial fixed point methods -lrb- or algorithms -rrb- .
scarf 's algorithm and its subsequent refinements and alternatives have become practical tools for assessing the consequences for the entire economy of a change in the economic environment or a major change in economic policy -- to engage in comparative statics when the model of equilibrium is too large to be solved graphically or by simple numerical calculations .
