Background
Foldes, Lucien Paul was born on November 19, 1930 in Vienna, Austria. Son of Egon and Marta (Landau) Foldes.
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Lucien Paul Foldes
Edit ProfileEducation
Bachelor of Commerce, Diploma Business Administration, Master of Science London School of Economies and Political Science, London, United Kingdom, 1950, 1951, 1952.
Career
Assistant Lector, Lector, Reader Economics, London School of Economies and Political Science, London, United Kingdom, 1951-1955, 1955-1961, 1961-1979. British Army, 1952-1954. Rockefeller Travelling Fellow, United States of America, 1962.
Professor of Economics, London School of Economies and Political Science, London, United Kingdom, London, England, since 1979.
Achievements
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My training at London School of Economies and Political Science, London, United Kingdom in traditional microeconomics and business subjects gave me interests in theoretical problems connected with costs, capital, welfare and uncertainty, as well as in more ‘applied’ questions of pricing policy, financial control and government regulation of industry. Following a thesis on the theory of costs (which led eventually to Number. 2 above), I at first taught and wrote mainly on problems of delegation in budgeting and control of public enterprise, my most substantial effort being Number.
3. At the same time I studied mathematics, particularly analysis and probability, and gradually shifted the emphasis of my work in this direction. During the 1960s I published a number of papers on topics in microeconomics and welfare (investment, redistribution, monopoly). Taking over a course on business administration, I reoriented the teaching towards quantitative decision models, particularly models of risk and uncertainty.
My first publication on mathematical decision theory was Number.
7 on expected utility, which sorts out systematically the relationships between (1) assumptions of continuity of preferences with respect to alternative topologies in a space of lotteries and (2) analytic properties of the corresponding cardinal utility function. Since completing this paper I have specialised increasingly — in teaching and consulting as well as research — on problems of risk in investment decisions, particularly on applications of stochastic processes. My main publication during this period is Number.
8, which considers a continuoustime, stochastic model of optimal accumulation, proving the existence of an optimal plan and characterising this plan by means of martingale properties of the shadow prices. I am continuing to work on models of this type, extending my previous results and investigat
ing the properties of optimal savings functions. This involves the study of certain boundary value problems for a second-order ordinary differential equation.
Membership
Served to Lieutenant British Army, 1952-1954. Fellow Royal Economics Society. Member American Economics Association, Institute Mathematics Statistics, London Mathematics Society, Royal Statistical Society.
