Claude d'Aspremont - Biographical informationEducation
From the Francqui foundation noticeProfessor Claude d'Aspremont was born in Paris in 1946. Professor d'Aspremont is full Professor in the Department of Economics at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he teaches Social Welfare Therory and Microeconomics. He is Research Director of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE). He also teaches Epistemology and Economics at the Universitary Faculties Saint Louis in Brussels. After a “Licence” in Philosophy and a “Licence et Maîtrise” in Economics at the Catholic University of Louvain (1969), he earned an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. degree in Game Theory from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University (1973) in California, as an I.C.M. - fellow. Back at the Catholic University of Louvain, he did his research work at CORE, where we acted as co-director from 1980 to 1983 and from 1988 to 1991, and taught at the Economics Department, where he acted as President from 1991 to 1994. He was also a visiting Professor and did research in various other Belgian and foreign universities (Namur, Paris, Strasbourg, Marseille, Stanford). He has published numerous articles in international scientific journals. He was elected “Fellow of the Econometric Society” in 1984. in 1989, he became a member of the “Comité scientifique” attached to the “Ministère de l'Education Nationale”, and later to the “Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche”, in France. His research has been entirely devoted to the application of Social Choice Theory and Game Theory to Economics in the three following areas : Public Economics, Industrial Economics and the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics. In Public Economics, his interest went to the evaluation of collective welfare. First, starting from simple principles (individual rationality, collective effeciency and equity), he achieved a formal comparison of the social welfare criteria that are most debated : the utilitarian criterion as presented by J. Harsanyi (philosopher, game-theorist, 1994 Nobel Laureate), and the egalitarian criterion of J. Rawls (the Harvard Philosopher). Using Game Theory, he contributed to the implementation of such criteria in situations where decision decentralization and information dissemination, as well as the strategic behaviour of the actors, could hinder collective efficiency. One application, that he started long ago, concerns international agreements on environmental issues and advocates the Principle of Reciprocal Compensation against the “Polluter Pays” principle. While pursuing this line of research, he is also interested by other applications, like the Regulation and the Deregulation of Public Services, with more of less competitive features. In industrial Organization, he applied game-theoretical methods to the investigation of competition and antitrust policies. He has put forward the importance of two-stage models, allowing for short and long term decisions, and the analysis of the credibility of firms long term strategies. In particular, he has concentrated his research work on strategies of product differentiation, on the stability of cartels and on cooperative agreements in R&D, for particular industries. He has shown, in several ways, that partial cooperation within an industry could be beneficial both to the firms and to the consumers, this illustrating the complexity of the cases to be tackled by the antitrust policy. It is not clear though what the impact of such phenomena of “imperfect competition”, so important at the industry microeconomic level, would be on the global economy, at the macroeconomic level. Using a general model of the economy, integrating the multiplicity and interdependency of all markets and behaviours, he has recently emphasized the incidence of imperfect competition on the economic evolution and, in particular, on the employment level. He is associate editor of the following scientific journals : Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Economics/Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie. |