Roy Radner papers, 1951-2014

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Access restricted. The Correspondence series is closed until 2050 due to prolific personnel and tenure review files and recommendations. Records pertaining to employment where individuals are...
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Summary

Creator:
Radner, Roy, 1927-
Abstract:
Roy Radner (1927-2022) was the Leonard N. Stern Professor of Business, Emeritus at New York University. This collection documents his professional life through his correspondence, writings, research, and teaching. It was acquired as part of the Economists' Papers Archive.
Extent:
36 Linear Feet (24 boxes.)
1 Megabytes (One set.)
Language:
Material in English.
Collection ID:
RL.11298

Background

Scope and content:

This collection contains material related to Radner's writings, correspondence, teaching, and research.

The Writings series contains his published and unpublished papers and related material, such as correspondence with editors and colleagues, multiple drafts with handwritten notes, and handwritten sheets of mathematical developments.

The Correspondence series mostly contains his professional correspondence (there is a small amount of personal correspondence).

The Teaching series contains his teaching material, such as syllabi, reading lists and packets, and exercises with solutions).

The Research series contains material on seminars, workshops, study groups, and the like.

The Writings by Others series contains material written by other researchers, with or (in most cases) without notes from Radner.

Biographical / historical:

Roy Radner (1927-2022) was a white American academic and research economist who was born in Chicago. He earned a BS (1950), MS (1951), and PhD (1956) in mathematics from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation, "Team Decision Functions," was supervised by Leonard Savage. He was a researcher at the Cowles Commission (1951-1957) before moving to the University of California, Berkeley (1957-1969), Harvard University (1977-1979), and AT&T Bell Laboratories (1979-1995). After retiring from AT&T, he moved to New York University (1995-2017) and became the Leonard N. Stern Professor of Business in 1996. Throughout these years, he also worked as a consultant for various private and public entities.

He is probably most well-known among scholars for three contributions. The first one is on the theory of "Team", especially with Jacob Marschak, which culminated in the publication of Economic Theory of Team in 1972. The second is on growth theory, with his 1961 contribution to the so-called "Turnpike Theorems." The third is on general equilibrium theory with time and uncertainty, where he introduced a notion of equilibrium involving rational expectations in the early 1970s, now known as a "Radner Equilibrium" in financial economics. More generally, he made key contributions to the economics of information and on bounded rationality in economics, and later in life, he became interested in environmental studies and climate change treaties.

He was married to economist Charlotte Kuh and had four children: Hilary, Ami, Ephraim, and Erica.

Acquisition information:
The Roy Radner papers were received by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library as a gift in 2015.
Processing information:

Processed by Dorian Jullien, September 2016.

Electronic records processed by Zachary Tumlin, June 2023.

Accession described in this collection guide: 2015-0096.

This collection arrived from Radner fairly well divided into six groups: Published Papers (six boxes), Notes on Published Papers (two boxes), Notes on Research (four boxes), Correspondence (seven boxes), Miscellaneous Files/Papers (one box) and Teaching Notes (five boxes). Correspondence remained practically untouched; a very small number of letters from the other files have been refiled here. Teaching Notes were renamed Teaching and reorganized alphabetically. For the same reason, the remaining four groups were collapsed into three new series: Writings, Research, and Writings by Others. Accordingly, it should be noted that the series Research partly overlaps with Teaching in the sense that most workshops run by Radner could be attended by students, and the latter could be graded on a paper about the contents of these workshops.

Arrangement:

The Roy Radner papers are arranged into five series: Writings, Correspondence, Teaching, Research, and Writings by Others.

Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Contents

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Restrictions:

Access restricted. The Correspondence series is closed until 2050 due to prolific personnel and tenure review files and recommendations. Records pertaining to employment where individuals are identified are closed for 70 years.

Access note. Some materials in this collection are electronic records that require special equipment. Contact Research Services with questions.

Terms of access:

The copyright interests in this collection have not been transferred to Duke University. For more information, consult the Rubenstein Library's Citations, Permissions, and Copyright guide.

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Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Roy Radner papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.