Remembering Piotr Evdokimov

Piotr Evdokimov passed away on October 4, 2023. Piotr was a brilliant and effervescent scholar; we will miss him dearly. He was a graduate student from 2009 to 2014 in the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota. Piotr became an experimental and behavioral economist who traveled the world with appointments in Mexico, Sydney, Moscow and Berlin.

 

From the beginning of his academic career, Piotr's research interests centered around testing experimentally formal theories of strategic interaction. Piotr's Ph.D. dissertation, Implicit and Explicit Communication in Experiments, set the scene for his subsequent scientific pursuits. His first project, Forward Induction: Thinking and Behavior, tethered subtle game-theoretic abstractions to tangible, measurable, experimental results. Piotr continued on this research line with other projects. In a particularly interesting recent paper, Higher-Order Learning, his results posed serious fundamental challenges to recent theoretical research on learning about others’ learning, which can be essential for dynamic coordination under uncertainty.

 

Piotr was a friend and a colleague. His passing is a stunning reminder for us all to reach out to one another. May he rest in peace.