Jacques Drèze

Jacques H. Drèze (5 August 1929 – 25 September 2022) was a Belgian economist noted for his contributions to economic theory, econometrics, and economic policy as well as for his leadership in the economics profession. Drèze was the first President of the European Economic Association in 1986 and was the President of the Econometric Society in 1970. Jacques Drèze was also the father of five sons. One son is the economist, Jean Drèze, who is known for his work on poverty and hunger in India (some of which has been in collaboration with Amartya K. Sen); another son, Xavier Drèze, was a professor of Marketing at UCLA. Drèze's contributions to economics combine policy-relevance and mathematical techniques. Indeed, models basically play the same role in economics as in fashion: they provide an articulated frame on which to show off your material to advantage ... ; a useful role, but fraught with the dangers that the designer may get carried away by his personal inclination for the model, while the customers may forget that the model is more streamlined than reality. Between games of strategy and games against nature, there remains a middle ground where uncertainties are partially controllable by the decision-maker—situations labelled "games of strength and skill" by von Neumann and Morgenstern, or "moral hazard" in subsequent work. Such problems of moral hazard have been discussed by Jacques Drèze in his dissertation, leading to the 1961 paper (8), whose analysis was generalized in 1987 (76), and simplified in 2004 (123). Drèze's theory allows for preferences depending on the state of the environment. Rational behaviour is again characterised by subjective expected utility maximisation, where the utility is state-dependent, and the maximisation encompasses the choice of an optimal subjective probability from an underlying feasible set. With reference to state-dependent preferences and moral hazard, a natural application of long-standing interest to economists concerns the provision of safety, for instance through road investments that are aimed at saving lives.