MIT professor receives Harry M. Markowitz Award for research on the effect of technology

Andrew W. Lo was named winner of the $10,000 Harry M. Markowitz Award for his paper, "Moore's Law Vs. Murphy's Law in the Financial System: Who's Winning?"

The award was announced Thursday by the Journal of Investment Management and New Frontier Advisors in a joint statement.

The paper provided examples of technology capable of adapting to the "foibles in human behavior" so users can employ all the recent breakthroughs in computing hardware and software, data analytics and telecommunications that have changed the financial industry "safely, effectively and effortlessly," according to an abstract on the paper.

Mr. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris professor of finance and director of the laboratory for financial engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The awards, which recognize the impact of Mr. Markowitz's work as a financial economist and mathematician in both theoretical and applied finance, are sponsored by New Frontier and the JOIM. Winners were selected by a panel of Nobel laureates in economics, consisting of Mr. Markowitz, Robert C. Merton, Myron S. Scholes and William F. Sharpe.

Also given Special Distinction Awards were Gerald T. Garvey, Joshua Kazdin, Ryan LaFond, Joanna Nash and Hussein Safa for their paper, "A Pitfall in Ethical Investing: ESG Disclosures Reflect Vulnerabilities, not Virtues," and Moshe Levy for the paper, "Measuring Portfolio Performance: Sharpe, Alpha, or the Geometric Mean."