Introduction to the Special Issue of Games and Economic Behavior in honor of Martin Shubik

Martin Shubik was born in New York City on March 24, 1926. This special issue of Games and Economic Behavior is a somewhat belated celebration of Martin’s eightieth birthday. Martin is a scientist of prodigious energy and passion for research. Since his eightieth birthday he has published several papers and completed the third volume of his monumental work on the theory of money. In total (at last count – by the time this essay is published the number may well have increased), Martin has published three hundred and six articles and nineteen books. He has contributed to many areas of economics, primarily in bringing game-theoretic analysis to economic theory. Of the founding fathers of modern game theory, Martin Shubik stands out as the visionary who foresaw early on that game theory was destined to become the unifying methodology for social sciences broadly construed and for modern economic theory in particular. Martin has endeavored with exceptional devotion throughout his career to make this vision come true, and has made numerous significant contributions to the theory of markets, both in its general and partial equilibrium formulations, as well as to a number of different areas amenable to game-theoretic reasoning in the social sciences. In order to provide a contextual introduction to the articles in this special Issue, we briefly discuss some of Martin’s foundational contributions to three of his major research areas: Strategic market games, partial equilibrium analysis (broadly defined), and the interplay between cooperative games and markets. Martin Shubik’s work creating and developing the theory of strategic market games goes beyond embedding imperfect competition within a fully specified economic system. Modeling economic activity as a playable game, including a specification of how prices are formed for all possible strategy profiles, has led to several important breakthroughs. First, and most important, specifying the strategy sets and the rules of the game to handle behavior in and out of equilibrium naturally leads to the emergence of financial institutions within the model, such as money, credit, and bankruptcy rules. This vision is at the heart of Shubik’s (1999a, 1999b) two-volume set, The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions. Shubik (1973) and Shapley and Shubik (1977) develop variants of strategic market games based on different credit arrangements, and Shubik and Wilson (1977) study optimal bankruptcy rules in a model with fiat money. Also see Dubey et al. (2005) for a general equilibrium approach to asset-pool markets with strategic de-