Franklin M. Fisher

Franklin Marvin Fisher (December 13, 1934 – April 29, 2019) was an American economist. He taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 to 2004.

Biography Fisher attended Harvard University, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1955 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude) in 1956, followed by a Master's degree in 1957 and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1960. His doctoral thesis was entitled A Priori Information and Time Series Analysis. He served as an expert witness in matters involving antitrust, contract disputes, valuation, damages, and trademark infringement for many years. He was the chief economic witness for IBM in its antitrust confrontation with the United States Department of Justice, a case the Government dropped in 1982 after 13 years. He served in a similar role on behalf of the United States Department of Justice in the case of United States v. Microsoft.

Publications Fisher was the author or co-author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books. In 1985, he edited Antitrust and Regulation: Essays in Memory of John J. McGowan, which contains original essays by economists and lawyers addressing important aspects of antitrust and regulation.

He wrote a monograph sponsored by the Econometric Society on the economic theory of general equilibria and disequilibria:

Awards Fisher received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1973. He had been a fellow of the Econometric Society since 1963, and from 1968 to 1977 he was the editor of Econometrica, Society's journal. He was President of the Econometric Society in 1979. He was also a member of the American Economic Association. He had been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1969.