CMU Alumnus Shares Nobel Prize in Economics

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As a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1960s, Dale Mortensen rubbed shoulders with two future Nobel laureates in economics: Herb Simon and Robert E. Lucas Jr.

"I was exposed to ideas, particularly Herb Simon's ideas, about economics," Mortensen said yesterday during a conference call from Denmark after winning the 2010 Nobel Prize in economics. "I never was totally convinced by Professor Simon, but it did affect my thinking that economics needed to be more realistic than it was."

Mortensen, 71, an economics professor at Northwestern University and a visiting professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, received his doctorate in economics …