Following six decades of mentoring students and contributing groundbreaking work to the field of economics, Thomas A. Marschak, renowned economist and professor emeritus at the Haas School of Business, died at the age of 93 on Jan. 31.
After arriving at Haas in 1960 as an assistant professor, Marschak spent much of his life teaching and researching on campus. According to his Haas faculty profile, he was most known for his work concerning the technology and design of efficient organizations. Later in life, Marschak continued to conduct research and had a paper accepted into the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics just two weeks before his passing.
“When I first met Tom in 2017, he was already in his late 80s. I was shocked by the fact that he was still doing economic research, and honestly I wasn’t sure how engaged he would be,” said UC Santa Cruz assistant professor Dong Wei, a co-author of the recent paper and a former graduate student of Marschak. “It turned out that Tom was extremely hands-on and actively involved in every stage of the project.”
Marschak began his career as a researcher at the tender age of 17 when he graduated from the University of Chicago with honors, according to his Haas obituary. He would go on to win several awards during his life, including the McKinsey Foundation Prize and Fulbright-Hays research award.He also received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Econometric Society, as noted on his faculty page.
Marschak was a member of the Haas Economic Analysis & Policy and Operations & IT Management academic groups during his tenure.Through his work with both groups, he “spanned in his work even more areas than these two groups traditionally have done,” said Professor Richard Lyons, Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and former Haas dean, in Marschak’s Haas obituary.
“In so many ways Tom was way ahead of his time,” Lyons continued. “His work covered IT, data science, use of data to drive enterprise value: These are some of the defining issues of our current time.”
Beyond his extensive work as a researcher, Marschak also contributed greatly to campus over the six decades he spent at Haas, rising from an assistant professor to a professor in 1967 and chairman of the Center for Research in Management Science from 1968 to 1970. Even after his “retirement” in 2013, becoming a professor emeritus after over 50 years of teaching, Marschak returned to actively teaching for five more years and continued to mentor students, including his co-author Wei.
“Tom was one of the sharpest, most insightful, and most admirable economists I have ever seen,” Wei said. “His intellectual legacy has influenced many young economists including myself, and will certainly inspire many generations to come.”
