Lionel Wilfred McKenzie (January 26, 1919 – October 12, 2010) was an American economist. He was the Wilson Professor Emeritus of Economics at the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private university, private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants Undergraduate education, undergraduate and graduate degrees, including Doctorate, do ...

. He was born in

Montezuma, Georgia Montezuma is a city in Macon County, Georgia ( ZIP code ''31063''). The population was 3,460 at the 2010 census, a decrease of 13.5% since 2000. It is home to the armory of Bravo Company, 648th Engineers of the Georgia Army National Guard. Histo ...

. He completed undergraduate studies at Duke University in 1939 and subsequently moved to

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

that year as a Rhodes Scholar. McKenzie worked with the

Cowles Commission The Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics is an economic research institute at Yale University. It was created as the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at Colorado Springs in 1932 by businessman and economist Alfred Cowles. In 193 ...

while it was in Chicago and served as an assistant professor at Duke from 1948–1957. Having received his Ph.D. at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

in 1956, McKenzie moved to Rochester where he was responsible for the establishment of the graduate program in economics. McKenzie has been the recipient of numerous professional awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, election to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1978, the Order of the Rising Sun in 1995 and honorary doctorates from Keio University in 1998 and Kyoto University in 2004. The latter three reflect the success of his many Japanese students. McKenzie has been referred to as "the father of the mathematical economists in Japan".

Work

His research focused on

general equilibrium In economics, general equilibrium theory attempts to explain the behavior of supply, demand, and prices in a whole economy with several or many interacting markets, by seeking to prove that the interaction of demand and supply will result in an ov ...

and capital theory. Although most widely known as a co-creator of the Arrow–Debreu–McKenzie model, he also published a book and numerous research papers, including: * "On Equilibrium in Graham's Model of World Trade and Other Competitive Systems", ''Econometrica'', 1954. * "Demand Theory Without a Utility Index", ''The Review of Economic Studies'', 1957. * "On the Existence of General Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy", ''Econometrica'', 1959. * , 1976 * "The Classical Theorem on Existence of Competitive Equilibrium", ''Econometrica'', 1981. * "Turnpike Theory, Discounted Utility, and the von Neumann Facet" ''Journal of Economic Theory'', 1983. * "General Equilibrium", ''The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', 1987, v. 2, pp. 498–512. * "

Turnpike Theory Turnpike theory refers to a set of economic theories about the optimal path of accumulation (often capital accumulation) in a system, depending on the initial and final levels. In the context of a macroeconomic exogenous growth model, for example, ...

", ''The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', 1987, v. 4, pp. 712–20. * ''Classical General Equilibrium Theory'', The MIT Press, 2002. The 1954 paper provided the first proof of the existence of a

, using

Kakutani's fixed point theorem In mathematical analysis, the Kakutani fixed-point theorem is a fixed-point theorem for set-valued functions. It provides sufficient conditions for a set-valued function defined on a convex, compact subset of a Euclidean space to have a fixed poi ...

. Another proof, by

Kenneth Arrow Kenneth Joseph Arrow (23 August 1921 – 21 February 2017) was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972. In economics ...

and Gérard Debreu, was published in the next issue of the same journal. The 1957 paper appears to include the first derivation of

Shephard's lemma Shephard's lemma is a major result in microeconomics having applications in the theory of the firm and in consumer choice. The lemma states that if indifference curves of the expenditure or cost function are convex, then the cost minimizing point ...

in the context of consumer theory. In 2014, Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub published a book arguing that McKenzie was unfairly excluded from the Nobel Prizes which both Arrow and Debreu won for work on general equilibrium theory.

Major publications

* *

References

External links

*
Valuable Materials to Trace the Professor's Line of Thought

Economist Lionel McKenzie to be Honored by Kyoto University

Inventory of the Lionel W. McKenzie Papers, 1942–2004 and undated
Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University {{DEFAULTSORT:McKenzie, Lionel W. 1919 births 2010 deaths University of Rochester faculty American economists General equilibrium theorists American Rhodes Scholars People from Montezuma, Georgia Princeton University alumni Duke University alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun Fellows of the Econometric Society Presidents of the Econometric Society Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association