Avinash Dixit

Avinash Kamalakar Dixit (born August 6, 1944 in Bombay, India) is an Indian-American economist. He is currently John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University (Hong Kong) and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Education

Dixit received a B.Sc. from Bombay University in 1963 in Mathematics and Physics, a B.A. from Cambridge University in 1965 in Mathematics (Corpus Christi College, First Class), and a Ph.D. in 1968 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Economics.

Career

Dixit has been the John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University since July 1989. He is also Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University (Hong Kong) and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He previously taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the University of California, Berkeley, at Balliol College, Oxford and at the University of Warwick. In 1994 Dixit received the first-ever CES Fellow Award from the Center for Economic Studies at the University of Munich.

Dixit has also held visiting scholar positions at the International Monetary Fund and the Russell Sage Foundation. He was President of the Econometric Society in 2001, and was Vice-President (2002) and President (2008) of the American Economic Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.

With Robert Pindyck he is author of “Investment Under Uncertainty” (Princeton University Press, 1994; ISBN 0691034109), the first text-book exclusively about the real options approach to investments, and described as “a born-classic” [1] in view of its importance to the theory.

Selected publications

• 1976. The Theory of Equilibrium Growth. Oxford University Press.
• 1980. Theory of International Trade, with Victor Norman. Cambridge University Press
• [1976] 1990. Optimization in Economic Theory, 2nd ed., Oxford. Description and contents preview.
• 1991. Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life, with Barry Nalebuff, New York: W.W. Norton.
• 1993. The Art of Smooth Pasting, Vol. 55 of series Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics, eds. Jacques Lesourne and Hugo Sonnenschein. Reading, UK: Harwood Academic Publishers.
• 1996a.Investment Under Uncertainty, co-authored by Robert Pindyck. Princeton University Press.
• 1996b. The Making of Economic Policy: A Transaction Cost Politics Perspective (Munich Lectures in Economics), M.I.T. Press. Description.
• 2004. Lawlessness and Economics: Alternative Modes of Governance], Gorman Lectures in Economics, University College London, Princeton University Press. Description and ch. 1, Economics With and Without the Law.
• 2008a. The Art of Strategy: A Game-Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life with Barry Nalebuff, New York: W. W. Norton.
• 2008b. "economic governance," in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition. Abstract.
• 2009. Games of Strategy, with Susan Skeath, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999, 3rd edition.

External links

• Short biography
• Curriculum vitae
• Recent writings