Roman Frydman is a Polish–American economist at New York University and the author of more than ten books aboutmacroeconomic theory and privatization.
Frydman's research, exemplified by his two recent books with Michael D. Goldberg, Imperfect Knowledge Economics: Exchange Rates and Risk (Princeton University Press, 2007) and Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price, Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State (Princeton University Press, 2011), argues that markets cannot be predicted accurately by deterministic optimization models, particularly models promoted by adherents of the rational expectations hypothesis.
Rather, Frydman argues that predictive models must take into account the role of contingent events, irrationality, imperfect knowledge and communication among the market participants.
"Imperfect Knowledge Economics" presents a model that many critics have described as not only more flexible, but also more predictive of empirical events.
[6] In 2001 he founded the Center on Capitalism & Society at Columbia with his frequent collaborator, Nobel Memorial Prize winner Edmund Phelps.