university of chicago noteworthy characteristics

In the past two and half decades, Jasmina has published nearly 50 articles all of which contribute in some fashion to the research program she first developed in her graduate work. They thought they saw a brilliant young economist pioneering a novel approach to the study of markets, and luckily for SFU they managed to hire her. Subsequently, her work on modeling learning in the cobweb model to study coevolution in that framework came to the attention of people at SFU. John McCallum was instrumental in attracting her to McGill. When it came time to find a job, because she was a Fulbright Scholar the US market was not open to her. This speaks to another of her remarkable characteristics: resourcefulness, the willingness and indeed determination to seek out the people and ideas necessary to develop her approach. Upon learning that other economists were working on similar issues, she arranged to write part of her dissertation as a fellow of the Santa Fe Institute and finished her work at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, `where a group headed by Tom Sargent was interested in the same class of problems'. Robert Lucas, one of her referees in the early 1990s writes that the University of Chicago was not at all a center of expertise on the learning processes and genetic algorithms that were essential to Jasmina's program, forcing Jasmina to do `her initial work almost without guidance'. This decision speaks to another of Jasmina's remarkable characteristics: independence, a determination to forge her own path. At some point in her time at Chicago, Jasmina decided that she wanted to follow a different path, to study the coevolution of expectations and markets. Their romance was begun in the form an energetic argument over rational expectations - ironically, given her subsequent path, Jasmina argued in favor of rational expectations, and Momo against. There she first met Momo, an executive in a prominent Yugoslav corporation based in Chicago. That naturally led her to the University of Chicago. She was at the time quite interested in the rational expectations approach to macroeconomics.

Quiet, deep confidence in her judgements and abilities, definitely, but not a hint of arrogance.ĭespite her base in Sarajevo far from the center of power and influence in Yugoslavia, she won the Fulbright Fellowship to do graduate work in the United States. Despite her many accomplishments and honours there is not a bit of arrogance in her character. This speaks to one of Jasmina's remarkable characteristics, modesty. And he learned about it, not from Jasmina, but years after the fact from the head examiner. In her final examination she was awarded a mark of 11, on a 1 to 10 scale! We know this not from Jasmina, but from her husband Momo Deretic. She was a star student in her undergraduate days at the University of Sarajevo. Jasmina’s journey from Sarajevo to Simon Fraser University reveals much about her character. Jasmina was a pioneer in opening these fruitful new approaches, and a major contributor to their development. Both computational and experimental economics are relatively new, but they have grown in influence over recent decades.

To validate her models of learning she conducted experiments in which learning dynamics can be observed under more tightly controlled conditions. As a result she has come to be one of the most prominent practitioners of the field of computational economics. To study the coevolution of beliefs and market outcomes she has needed to resort to computer simulation. From the very beginning of her research career Jasmina's work was driven by the conviction that coevolution itself was potentially a source of important economic phenomena, and that to understand them we needed to incorporate realistic modeling of the process by which expectations are formed in our economic models. The dominant approach in modeling the macro economy has ignored coevolution by imposing the condition that expectations are fulfilled, the rational expectations approach. That is, the economy and peoples' expectations about it coevolve. Peoples' economic behavior is driven by their expectations concerning the future evolution of the economy, and in consequence the evolution of the economy is driven by those expectations.

She was a pillar of the department and at the peak of her career.Ī distinctive approach to understanding markets and the macro economy characterize all of Jasmina's research. Her untimely death comes as a shock to her family, to the department and to her friends and colleagues around the world. It is with great sadness that the SFU Economics community announces the passing of professor Jasmina Arifovic on January 24, 2022.

University of chicago noteworthy characteristics