Bruce will be sadly retiring from UEA in October and in recognition of his distinguished service to the University he has been awarded the title of Emeritus Professor. Bruce came to UEA in 1985 having taught in Cambridge and has been Professor of Economics since 1994. He is a former Dean of Economic and Social Studies and was twice Head of the School of Economics. He is one of the four founders of UEA’s internationally acclaimed research Centre for Competition Policy and has held visiting research Fellowships at EUI Florence and University of Melbourne.
Bruce has co-authored six books and numerous academic papers on market structure, business contracts, and the economics of competition policy. He is a former editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics and was elected to the management committees of two international research societies (EARIE and ACE). He has won 19 competitive research grants since 1989 (half of them from the ESRC or European equivalents). He was principal supervisor to 26 PhD students, all of whom have applied their research to pursue successful careers (half in academia and the other half in regulatory agencies or consultancy) in 16 different countries.
Bruce’s research has had a substantial impact on public policy internationally. He has held advisory positions at the European Commission and in the UK. He has been an invited speaker at competition authorities in Washington, Tokyo and across Europe. He is a former member of the Competition Commission and advises business leaders as the academic associate at KPMG on competition and regulation. He is one of only a handful of academics selected regularly for Who’s Who Competition Lawyers and Economists.
Bruce and the early days at UEA
(by Bob Sugden)
Bruce has been at UEA almost as long as I have (i.e. a very long time). The first appointment committee I was on after coming to UEA as a professor in the Spring of 1985 was for a lecturer in economics to start work that Autumn. We appointed an up-and-coming industrial economist called Bruce Lyons. I can’t claim much credit for this, because everyone agreed he was the best candidate, but it was certainly a good decision. The chairman of the committee was Martin Hollis, the Dean of our School and the Professor of Philosophy. Martin was very impressed by Bruce’s performance (although, as an Oxford PPE man, he was puzzled about why Bruce would want to move from a Lectureship at Cambridge to one at UEA).
At UEA, we still like to boast about how we were pioneers of experimental and behavioural economics in the 1980s. That is entirely true, but what is sometimes forgotten is that this was only part of a larger interdisciplinary project. In those days, economics was just a ‘sector’ of the School of Social Studies (or ‘SOC’), a deliberately interdisciplinary unit which included economics, politics, sociology and philosophy. Martin Hollis’s speciality was the philosophy of social science, and he was deeply committed to developing interdisciplinary work in the School. I think that was one of the reasons he wanted to appoint me, and why, in the same year, Albert Weale (another young and very interdisciplinary academic) was appointed as the new Professor of Politics. Martin probably detected the right tendencies in Bruce too.
Over the following years, what we came to call the ‘Rationality Group’ of the School gradually developed and expanded. It had a star cast – including (though not all at the same time) Robin Cubitt, Shaun Hargreaves Heap, Martin Hollis, Marco Mariotti, Judith Mehta, Chris Starmer, Yanis Vaorufakis (the Yanis Varoufakis), Albert Weale, me, and yes, Bruce Lyons. In different ways, we were all interested in the concept of rationality and how it was used in social science and philosophy. The 1980s and 1990s were the high water mark of rational choice theory. Rational choice models were being used in politics, sociology, moral philosophy and evolutionary biology as well as in economics. Game theory was one of the hottest topics for economic theorists, and there was a belief that it could unify the social sciences. But it was also generating deep conceptual puzzles for theorists to solve – particularly the ultimately doomed ‘refinement project’. And experimental research was beginning to show that people’s actual choices were systematically ‘irrational’ in ways that intuitively didn’t seem unreasonable. Our interest was in the foundations of rational choice theory. Were the foundational assumptions really principles of rationality? Did real people conform to them? (This was where experimental economics came in.) Were they even coherent?
One of the earliest projects of our group was to write a book that could be used a text for a PPE course. This became The Theory of Choice: A Critical Guide, published in 1992. It has five authors – Shaun Hargreaves Heap, Martin Hollis, Bruce Lyons, Robert Sugden and Albert Weale. It has a truly original structure, invented by Martin Hollis. You could call it a handbook, but it’s not like a modern ‘Handbook of …’ (i.e. a massive tome of long literature surveys). It’s not particularly long, and broken down into short self-contained chapters and even shorter ‘keyword’ entries which define key concepts and give potted biographies of key people. The chapters are sprinkled with self-contained ‘boxes’ which present examples and paradoxes. Everything is connected together by links, like items on the web, so you can dip into the book anywhere and move through it in whatever direction you choose. Each piece has a single author, so individual idiosyncrasies show through, which makes it fresher and more entertaining. It takes no unified position on anything. But it was constructed through many meetings of all the authors, reading and discussing each other’s work. Martin’s idea was that the book would work as a bluffer’s guide to PPE – if you had read nothing more than the book and were sufficiently intelligent, you would be able to write well-informed essays on any topic related to choice, and talk impressively at seminars, vivas or interviews. (In a way, Martin was designing the book for people like himself – he embodied the English ideal of the gifted amateur who can achieve great things without trying too hard.) Writing the book was a great experience. We all learned a lot from each other and from writing about topics that we didn’t know much about until Martin allocated them to us. Bruce wrote the chapters on ‘Risk, Ignorance and Imagination’, ‘Game Theory’, ‘Bargaining’ and ‘Organisations’, and keywords on (to name just a few in their alphabetical order) Jean-Charles de Borda, the core, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, and time preference.
Another product of the ‘Rationality Group’ era was an undergraduate course on decision and game theory which Bruce and I designed and taught, called ‘Strategy and Risk’. In the 1980s, game theory hardly featured in the theory that was taught to undergraduate and masters students. (I taught the MA course – they were MAs in the interdisciplinary era, not MScs – on microeconomic theory, and I felt obliged to concentrate on general equilibrium theory and duality.) Game theory was an esoteric sideline, suitable for a ‘special subject’ rather than a core course.
Of all the courses I have taught, ‘Strategy and Risk’ is probably my favourite. One thing that Bruce and I were most proud of was the way we organised the seminars. A seminar began with what was effectively an experiment, with the students as the subjects, and with real incentives. But instead of converting the experimental currency units into cash payments, we converted them into assessment grades, which had a small weight in the overall course assessment. Then the seminar discussion focused on the decisions that students had made in the experiment. I’d surprised if this kind of assessment would be allowed in the modern era. There was more academic freedom then than now, but even then it raised eyebrows. Our justification was one that I still maintain, and is summed up in a maxim of Thomas Schelling: ‘A normative theory must produce strategies that are at least as good as what people can do without them’. Our assessment system tested the skills a game theory course ought to teach, i.e. how to choose good strategies to play against your actual opponents.
It was a great loss to behavioural economics that over the years, Bruce focused more on industrial and competition economics. In the last few years, I thought we were beginning to reclaim him – as a participant in the Network for Integrated Behavioural Science, helping to design experiments to investigate consumer engagement with markets, and thinking about the implications of behavioural findings for how markets should be regulated. So it’s another loss that he is choosing to retire. But I have fellow-feeling for his desire to spend more time in the Yorkshire Dales.
A note from Sean Ennis, CCP Director
(by Sean Ennis)
Bruce is a special person, distinguished by his kindness, generosity and incisive mind.
Bruce did something special for me on what was, I think, the first time I came to UEA in 2008. I was an external research visitor to CCP for one week. When he found out that no one had yet shown me Norwich city centre, he took it upon himself to do so. He gave me a fantastic, good-spirited tour of the place, at a time when he could, I’m sure, have been doing many other useful things. He explained the origins of the the town of two cathedrals and the complicated history of Norfolk. To an amateur historian like myself, this was precious. This example is illustrative of his kindness, support and interest in others. More broadly, his approach exemplified a broader ingredient at UEA, which has made UEA such a collegial place to be over the years.
He has also played a key role in the Centre for Competition Policy history as one of the founders and also as a Deputy Director. In his support for the CCP, he has helped to shape an institution and the lives of many students who worked their way through the student programs, including many finishing with a PhD. His long line of research caught a field while it was young and helped to shape it. His contributions to research and policy application were international in scope, which is no surprise because his analysis and comments have always been sharp, precise and thoughtful, whatever the topic we have discussed. I am constantly impressed by his capacity to engage, to draw the essential strengths and weakness out of model or piece of empirical work, and then to suggest useful revisions or extensions seemingly without thought. He has made comments at CCP seminars throughout the years that have reshaped many papers. His fantastic intellectual engagement is only supplemented by his wit and conversation as a dining partner as we invited visitors to CCP out for dinner or lunch.
While he may be retiring, the relevance of his work is ongoing, and he still has important ongoing work with Bob Sugden on transactional fairness, which I think is foundational, and which has already influenced policy makers. Personally, I look forward to working with him in the future in whatever ways he deems fit, and CCP certainly will always welcome him with open arms: there can be a desk for him at CCP, a seat in our seminars and a regular offer of a dining chair, even as he hands in his active professorial chair.
