Remembering John Roberts (1945–2026)

The Department of Economics mourns the loss of John Roberts, a 1972 Ph.D. alumnus of our program and a pioneering figure in economics whose work made fundamental contributions to the study of organizations, incentives and strategic behavior.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, John earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Manitoba before completing his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Hugo Sonnenschein. After graduation, he taught at Northwestern University and then joined the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1980, where he spent the remainder of his career and held the Jonathan B. Lovelace Professorship.

John exemplified the best of Minnesota economics. He studied big questions and brought the power of economic theory to bear in producing beautiful answers. Early in his career, working with Andrew Postlewaite, he conducted seminal work on the noncooperative foundations of general equilibrium theory, clarifying when the assumptions of price-taking behavior made sense in economies with large numbers of households and firms, and when they did not. Later, working with Paul Milgrom and others, he developed the modern mathematical formulation of how people and firms develop reputations, how they evolve and how they disappear. With Paul Milgrom, he also helped lay the foundations for the theory of the firm and the theory of hierarchies. John was an economist’s economist. He showed us how simple mathematical formulations could light the way to an economics relevant for the real world.

John remained connected to Minnesota throughout his career. In 2001, he returned to deliver the Minnesota Lecture, our invited lecture honoring outstanding alumni. More recently, he was deeply involved in the department’s nomination of Andreu Mas-Colell for the University of Minnesota’s Outstanding Achievement Award. Many in the Minnesota Economics community last saw John in June 2024, when he traveled to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona to speak at the award ceremony honoring Andreu, his fellow Ph.D. student at Minnesota and a longtime close friend. At the ceremony, John presented Andreu with a thick University of Minnesota scarf — a reminder, offered with characteristic warmth and humor, that even for someone raised in Manitoba, Minnesota winters made a lasting impression.