I was on a Zoom call working with Gary no later than Thursday evening before he passed away the following day. Gary was one of the most creative, free-spirited, and caring individuals I have had the chance to work with and learn from.
Since we met a year and a half ago at ESA and started by laughing about this ambiguity paradox, we quickly embarked on working on other “weird” phenomenological topics related to human experience that we loved, meeting every week. What was great was how projects naturally arose from our regular Zoom conversations —no idea was too weird for him to work on if we could find a rigorous design and relevant economic implications. He was always so efficient and joyful at work, no matter what.
He was the first to help when I was applying for postdoc fellowships. Whenever he saw a potential fit between my work and brilliant minds, he would invite me (like at his top-notch conference), introduce me to researchers, and even refer me without me knowing, just hoping that spreading the good word in the world would create good “cosmological energy.” In many cases, these led to new opportunities, brilliant co-authors, and supportive mentors.
Gary told me that when he entered academia and started working with Matthew Rabin and George Akerlof, he brought to the lab ways of seeing the world from his adventurous past life (or rather, “past lives”—hopefully, his unfinished memoirs could get published). I only met Gary three times in person but clearly, he was not your usual academic. Through his unique social character, he was very tolerant of different worldviews and ways of being and talking to everyone (including me). Anyone who met him can tell you one of those Gary Stories. His passion for understanding humans and his curiosity about various cultures and disciplines were boundless and genuinely inspiring. He always considered methodological reflections central to pushing the scientific frontier of the study of human behavior.
Gary had immense faith in the next generation of behavioral and experimental economists, confident that they would contribute significantly to addressing general questions of economics and humanity. For him, showing other economists and scientists that new facts exist or that it is possible to establish them rigorously was not about producing “luxury knowledge goods” but rather about providing a public good beneficial to everyone involved in developing and testing models of human behavior. His analogy for experiments was: “lighting a beacon in the knowledge space.” It was so great to find in him a supporter of the following belief. The emergence of new technologies would shift the perception of those “weird” topics central to human experience (but usually not so to academic careers) to the forefront of research. He was definitely enthusiastic about actually using these emergent technologies to extend the realm of feasible empirical studies and permissible theories.
May your memory be a blessing, ‘Pirate.’
Stanford, May 20, 2024.
