(mailed to GTS members by Peyton Young on Wednesday, 30 July 2008)
With great sadness we report that, after a long illness, Michael Maschler of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem passed away on July 20, in Jerusalem, at the age of 81. He was a wonderful colleague, researcher, and teacher, and served as a member of the First Council of the Game Theory Society. Michael Maschler will be greatly missed by the game theory community at large.
Professor Michael Maschler was a major architect of the theory of games as we know it. He originated the Bargaining Set for cooperative games, whose conceptual offspring include the kernel and the nucleolus, and did many deep studies of their properties in a wide variety of applications; as a result, the Bargaining Set “family” today constitutes one of the three major approaches to cooperative game theory, together with the core and the Shapley value. His pioneering work on repeated games of incomplete information became the cornerstone of a very extensive literature on the subject, which continues to expand rapidly. He was one of the earliest to do experimental work on the theory of games in general, and in cooperative games in particular. He also contributed importantly to the dynamics of elections, to the theory of extensive games, to network games, and to various other topics in game theory.
Maschler was known as an excellent and much-beloved teacher and lecturer, and a willing citizen of the game theory community. He will be sorely missed, and his memory will be cherished.
Bob Aumann