Biographical Memoirs Volume 87 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Richard Drummong McKelvey
Richard Drummong McKelvey
Pages 294-315
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From page 295... ...
McKelvey helped spread that legacy. He was best known for a series of pathbreaking papers on the mathematical theory of voting in the 1970s, but he also made significant contributions to the application of statistical techniques to the analysis of political science data, social choice theory, computational techniques in economics, experimental economics and political science, and game theory.
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From page 296... ...
The intellectual heritage goes back at least a generation further, to his paternal grandfather, John Sr., who graduated from Oberlin in 1884 and was cofounder of the Harvard Law Review in 1886, becoming its first editor in chief. He authored McKelvey on Evidence, among other influential
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From page 297... ...
These were very exciting times in agronomy, and the Rockefeller Foundation project in Mexico produced pathbreaking developments in hybrid wheat and corn, leading to Norman Borlaug's 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Richard spent the first seven years of his life there, before the family moved back to New York, this time in Chappaqua, where he lived until college.
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From page 298... ...
In one that became a family legend, he swiped Girl Scout cookies from a box being sent to his older brother in college, substituting macaroni, a substance carefully selected for weight and the noise it made when shaken. HIGHER EDUCATION Following in the footsteps of his parents, grandparents, and several aunts and uncles, Richard enrolled at Oberlin College in 1961.
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From page 299... ...
In fact, the list of students and faculty during Richard's seven years there is a virtual who's who in positive political theory and the positivist approach to substantive subfields of political science: Peter Ordeshook, McKelvey, Bill Riker, Ken Shepsle, Mo Fiorina, Dick Fenno, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, John Aldrich, David Rhode, Bing Powell, Jerry Kramer, and others. CARRYING THE TORCH FROM ROCHESTER TO CARNEGIE TO CALTECH Before receiving his Ph.D.
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From page 300... ...
I know from my own experience there as a graduate student how exciting those times were. Charlie Plott, John Ferejohn, Mo Fiorina, Roger Noll, Gary Miller, Bob Forsythe, and McKelvey were doing positive political theory and laboratory experiments.
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From page 301... ...
He was honored as a Rochester distinguished scholar at the Rochester commencement ceremonies in 1999. He was surely delighted to be awarded a Fairchild Fellowship at Caltech in 1978, not for its prestige but because it meant he could spend the whole year doing research in a fertile intellectual environment.
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From page 302... ...
For example the winner of the game would earn the right to order "anything" at a local ice cream shop, provided he could eat it on the spot. Christopher recalled some outrageously huge sundaes that he and his brother indulged in.
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From page 303... ...
In fact, to celebrate his pranksterism, there were a number of pranks set up at his house after his memorial service: an upside-down jar filled with hundreds of marbles as well as examples of his esoteric projects. This included a mock up of the light-switch counter and his huge credit card collection: When he traveled around the world to conferences, he would seek out stores that offered free credit cards.
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From page 304... ...
He thought in a very detailed, algorithmic way and sought a physical or mechanical understanding of the model.2 This may seem odd to some who saw Richard as esoteric and theoretical, a guy who wrote papers mired in notation, in complex argument, and who sometimes lectured to the board as he wrote down this entire notation. At this same time in his career, he began his long collaboration with Peter Ordeshook, a collaboration best
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From page 305... ...
Still, with polls and interest group endorsements voters were able to vote rationally. In a theoretical model of information aggregation adapted from the rational expectations theory of markets, they proved that this information alone is sufficient to reveal enough to voters that even uninformed voters behave as if they were fully informed.
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From page 306... ...
He branched out to study a wide variety of political phenomena in the laboratory, including bargaining and negotiation, different voting rules for juries, information aggregation, political models of economic growth, and many abstract games -- some invented by him. Among his many significant contributions to game theory, two stand out.
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From page 307... ...
, a statistical model of equilibrium in games that significantly generalizes Nash equilibrium, and a tool for the statistical analysis of game theoretic data. Many of Richard's later experimental papers explored the theoretical properties of quantal response equilibrium and the testing of that theory in experimental games where the Nash equilibrium made starkly different comparative static predictions compared with QRE.
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From page 308... ...
In spite of Richard's strong, almost visceral negative reaction to any use of the term "bounded rationality," he also clearly saw it as a rigorous way to try to bring in behavioral factors to the language and equations of game theory. It started with an experimental study of the centipede game (1992)
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From page 309... ...
trembled and might have unusual behavioral types. Hence, the assumption that rationality is common knowledge was simply replaced by the assumption that a specific form of bounded rationality is common knowledge.
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From page 310... ...
One could rationalize the "errors" in QRE by assuming that players had privately observed payoff disturbances, producing a game of incomplete information. The term "quantal response" was adopted from the statistical literature, which had used similar terminology for stochastic models of discrete choice.
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From page 311... ...
His many fundamental contributions to political science, game theory, and laboratory experiments have had an enormous and continuing impact in the social sciences, and his students, many now professors at the most prestigious universities, are eagerly passing on his approach to socialscientific inquiry to the next generation. But he is already missed, both as a scholar and a person.
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From page 312... ...
4. A theoretical model of behavior is publication-proof if it will still accurately describe behavior after the model becomes public information.
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From page 313... ...
Elections with limited information: A fulfilled expectations model using contemporaneous poll and endorse ment data as information sources.
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From page 314... ...
Quantal response equilibria for extensive form games.
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From page 315... ...
Page. An experimental study of the effects of private information in the Coase theorem.
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