Alan Kirman is Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, (EHESS), Professor Emeritus at Aix Marseille University, and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He studied at Oxford University and obtained his Ph.D in economics from Princeton. He has been Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Warwick and at the European University Institute in Florence.
He is a Fellow of the Ecoonometric Society, of the European Economics Association, and has held a Houblon Norman Fellowship at the Bank of England. He was awarded the Humboldt Prize and has been President of the Association of Southern European Economic Theorists, (ASSET). He is Honorary Editor of JEBO, and Associate Editor of several other journals. He has published more than 150 articles in refereed journals and is the author of three books and editor of 12 others.
His main interest is in the way in which markets and their participants actually function and the link between micro and macro behaviour. As soon as we take into account the direct interaction between agents the relation between individual actions and aggregate outcomes becomes complicated. Economic activity is better viewed as the product of a complex self-organising system than as corresponding to the behaviour of an individual maximiser. Analysing real markets helps us to understand this sort of phenomenon.
