Ken Arrow received the 1972 Nobel Prize winner in economics together with Sir John Hicks, for pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory - theories underlying the assessment of business risk and government economic and welfare policies. Forty years later, he remains the youngest person to have received the award. 

Although best known as one of the 20th century’s most influential economists, Arrow got  his start in operations research and played a major role in the School of Engineering by helping to create and serving as a seminal faculty member in the Department of Operations Research – now part of Management Science and Engineering.

Arrow has focused on applying economic theory to real-world problems. He has studied and written on topics that include the economics of racial discrimination, malaria drugs, climate change, innovation and healthcare.In a paper written more than 50 years before healthcare reform, he noted that markets do not work in healthcare because patients lack the information to evaluate the quality of the services they are receiving. This is more than an astute analysis: his work changed how people think about healthcare and launched the still-evolving field of healthcare economics.

He is also the first economist to apply the learning curve to understand the role of experience in increasing productivity.He has shown that under certain conditions an economy reaches a general equilibrium. Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor Emeritus of Operations Research at Stanford. He has served on the economics faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard University and Stanford. He has received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.