COCKROACHES AND THE BENEFITS

COCKROACHES AND THE BENEFITS OF COARSE BEHAVIOR

While the focus of the academic community continued to be on making economics look more and more like physics, I felt biology was a better place to look for a frame of reference. I developed a biological analogue for economic behavior, writing a paper in collaboration with a fellow MIT graduate student, Joe Langsam, entitled “On the Optimal of Coarse Behavior Rules,” which was the lead article in a 1985 issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology. (Langsam earned a PhD in economics from MIT, but in the course of his graduate studies discovered a love of mathematics and added a PhD in that discipline as well. Shortly after coming to Morgan Stanley I recruited him to join me in fixed income research, where his double PhD earned him the sobriquet of “Doctor-Doctor.” Brilliant and with an unusually intuitive sense of both mathematics and finance, he now heads that department.)