Stephen Morris (game theorist)


Stephen Edward Morris is an economic theorist and game theorist especially known for his research in the field of global games. Since July 2019, he has been Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to that he taught at Princeton, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania. He was the editor of Econometrica for the period 2007–2011, and is currently president of the Econometric Society.

Biography

Morris's father was the senior UK diplomat Sir Willie Morris, who served as the UK's Ambassador to several countries. His mother was Ghislaine Morris.
Morris obtained a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics at Cambridge University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Economics at Yale University in 1991. He became an Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and an Associate Professor in 1996. In 1998 he moved to Yale as a full professor. In 2005 he became the Irving Fisher Professor of Economics at Yale. He moved to Princeton University in 2005, where he became the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics in 2007. In 2019 he moved to the MIT Department of Economics.
Morris is the founding editor of the BEPress Journals of Theoretical Economics and the editor of Econometrica for the period 2007–2011.
Morris is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 2002 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. He held the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2005–2006, and was the President of the Econometric Society in 2019.

Research contribution

Global coordination games belong to a subfield of game theory which gained momentum with the article by Morris and Shin. Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin considered a stylized currency crises model, in which traders observe the relevant fundamentals with small noise, and show that this leads to the selection of a unique equilibrium. This result is in stark contrast with models of complete information, which feature multiple equilibria.
Morris has also made important contributions to the theory of mechanism design. In his work with Dirk Bergemann on robust mechanism design they relaxed common knowledge assumptions which were prevalent in the early mechanism design literature. By formulating the mechanism design problem more precisely, they showed that simple mechanisms arise endogeneously. This provided a theoretical justification for the relatively simple auction design employed in practice, when compared to the complexity of optimal auctions suggested by the early literature.