Google and Mises

It’s fun how this article in the International Herald Tribune draws a link between Ludwig von Mises and Google’s advertising algorithms–the technology that is the very future of commerce–via the work of Leonid Hurwicz. “It was a course in economics that fired his imagination, however, and he went to the London School of Economics, where his teachers were Nicholas Kaldor and Friedrich Hayek. In 1939, Hurwicz moved to Geneva, where he studied at the Graduate Institute of International Studies and attended the seminar of Ludwig von Mises.”

For more on mechanism design, see this excellent piece by Robert Murphy.