astronomy

Hervé Moulin

Hervé Moulin is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Hervé Moulin rather than just read about it. In short: Hervé Moulin (born 1 August 1950) is a French mathematician who is the Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow.

Key takeaways

Hervé Moulin belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Hervé Moulin to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Hervé Moulin from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Hervé Moulin (born 1 August 1950) is a French mathematician who is the Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. He is known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division. He has written five books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles.

Education and career Moulin obtained his undergraduate degree from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1971 and his doctoral degree in Mathematics at the University of Paris-IX in 1975 with a thesis on zero-sum games, which was published in French at the Mémoires de la Société Mathématique de France and in English in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and its Applications. Moulin was the George A. Peterkin Professor of Economics at Rice University (from 1999 to 2013):, the James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University (from 1989 to 1999), the University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech (from 1987 to 1989), and Academic Supervisor at Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia (from 2015 to 2022). He is a fellow of the Econometric Society since 1983, and the president of the Game Theory Society for the term 2016 - 2018. He also served as president of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare for the period of 1998 to 1999. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2015.

Research On 1979, Moulin published a seminal paper in Econometrica introducing the notion of dominance solvable games. Dominance solvability is a solution concept for games which is based on an iterated procedure of deletion of dominated strategies by all participants. Dominance solvability is a stronger concept than Nash equilibrium because it does not require ex-ante coordination. Its only requirement is iterated common knowledge of rationality. His work on this concept was mentioned in Eric Maskin's Nobel Prize Lecture. One year later he proved an interesting result concerning the famous Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, which states that any voting procedure on the universal domain of preferences whose range contains more than two alternatives is either dictatorial or manipulable. Moulin proved that it is possible to define non-dictatorial and non-manipulable social choice functions in the restricted domain of single-peaked preferences, i.e. those in which there is a unique best option, and other options are better as they are closer to the favorite one. Moreover, he provided a characterization of such rules. This paper inspired a whole literature on achieving strategy-proofness and fairness (even in a weak form as non-dictatorial schemes) on restricted domains of preferences. Moulin is also known for his seminal work in cost sharing and assignment problems. In particular, jointly with Anna Bogomolnaia, he proposed the probabilistic-serial procedure as a solution to the fair random assignment problem, which consists of dividing several goods among a number of persons. Probabilistic serial allows each person to "eat" her favorite shares, hence defining a probabilistic outcome. It always produces an outcome which is unambiguously efficient ex-ante, and thus has a strong claim over the popular random priority. The paper was published in 2001 in the Journal of Economic Theory. By summer of 2016, the article had 395 citations. He has been credited as the first proposer of the famous beauty contest game, also known as the guessing game, which shows that players fail to anticipate strategic behavior from other players. Experiments testing the equilibrium prediction of this game started the field of experimental economics. Moulin's research has been supported in part by seven grants from the US National Science Foundation. He collaborates as an adviser with the fair division website Spliddit, created by Ariel Procaccia. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, the Paris School of Economics and the Aix-Marseille University organised a conference in his honor, with Peyton Young, William Thomson, Salvador Barbera, and Moulin himself among the speakers. In July 2018 Moulin was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).

Bibliography Moulin has published work jointly with Matthew O. Jackson, Scott Shenker, and Anna Bogomolnaia, among many other academics.

Books Moulin, Hervé (1979). Fondation de la théorie des jeux. Collection Méthodes (in French). Paris: Hermann. ISBN 978-2-7056-5905-9. Moulin, Hervé; Fogelman-Soulié, Françoise (1979). La convexité dans les mathématiques de la décision: optimisation et théorie micro-économique. Collection Méthodes (in French). Paris: Hermann. ISBN 978-2-7056-5904-2. Moulin, Hervé (1981). Théorie des jeux pour l'économie et la politique. Collection Méthodes (in French). Paris: Hermann. ISBN 978-2-7056-5931-8. Moulin, Hervé (1983). The strategy of social choice. Advanced textbooks in economics. Amsterdam New York: North-Holland Pub. ISBN 978-0-444-86371-3. Moulin, Hervé (1986). Game theory for the social sciences. Studies in game theory and mathematical economics (2nd ed.). New York: New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-5430-6. Moulin, Hervé (1988). Axioms of cooperative decision making. Econometric Society monographs. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-36055-5. Moulin, Hervé (1995). Cooperative Microeconomics: A Game-Theoretic Introduction. Princeton University Press. Moulin, Hervé (2004). Fair division and collective welfare. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-63311-6. Moulin, Hervé (2017). La construction d'une politique spatiale en France: entre indépendance nationale et dynamiques européennes, 1945-1975. Explorations (in French). Paris: Beauchesne. ISBN 978-2-7010-2258-1. Laslier, Jean-François; Moulin, Hervé; Sanver, M. Remzi; Zwicker, William S., eds. (2019). The Future of Economic Design: The Continuing Development of a Field as Envisioned by Its Researchers. Studies in Economic Design. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-18050-8. ISBN 978-3-030-18049-2.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Hervé Moulin

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Hervé Moulin claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Hervé Moulin before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Hervé Moulin ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Hervé Moulin

In research: Hervé Moulin appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Hervé Moulin in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Hervé Moulin is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1950 births, Academics of Adam Smith Business School, Academics of the University of Glasgow, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Hervé Moulin outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Hervé Moulin in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Hervé Moulin means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Hervé Moulin out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Hervé Moulin in simple terms?

Hervé Moulin (born 1 August 1950) is a French mathematician who is the Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow.

Why does Hervé Moulin matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Hervé Moulin?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Hervé Moulin.