Past Awards
The Lanchester Prize for 2011 is awarded to David Easley and Jon Kleinberg for their book, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010.
The study of networks has always been a central focus of operations research and the management sciences from the beginnings of the field, drawing from applications such as logistics, transportation, and telecommunications. More recently, there has been a growing public fascination with the complex connectedness of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet, in the ease with which global communication takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which our decisions can have subtle consequences for others. Starting with graph theory and game theory, this introductory level textbook makes a remarkable effort to write for a broad audience, and takes an interdisciplinary approach towards understanding complex networks and social behavior. It describes an emerging field that addresses fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.
The Committee members (Michael Fu, chair, James Dyer, Dorit Hochbaum, David Shmoys, David Yao, and Paul Zipkin) are pleased to designate David Easley and Jon Kleinberg as recipients of the 2011 Lanchester Prize.