Schelling was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Robert Aumann) for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis.
"[6] In 1969, Schelling joined Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy.
[4] He was among the "founding fathers" of the "modern" Kennedy School, as he helped to shift the curriculum's emphasis away from administration and more toward leadership.
[12][9][8] He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with Robert Aumann, for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.
They donated this money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an American 501 nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation.
Alice Schelling said her late husband had credited Smoky the Cowhorse by Will James, the winner of the Newbery Medal in 1927, as the most influential book he had read.
In a 1961 review, International Relations scholar Morton Kaplan described the book as a "strikingly original contribution" and a "landmark in the literature.
"[17] The bargaining itself is best thought of in terms of the other participant's actions, as any gains one might realize are highly dependent upon the "choices or decisions" of their opponent.
Specifically, Schelling mentions the actions taken by the U.S. during the Cuban and Berlin crises and how they functioned as not only preparation for war but also signals.
Much of this writing was influenced largely due to Schelling's personal interest in Game Theory and its application to nuclear armaments.
[25][26] In 1969 and 1971, Schelling published widely-cited articles dealing with racial dynamics and what he termed "a general theory of tipping.
He thus argued that motives, malicious or not, were indistinguishable as to explaining the phenomenon of complete local separation of distinct groups.
He used coins on graph paper to demonstrate his theory by placing pennies and dimes in different patterns on the "board" and then moving them one by one if they were in an "unhappy" situation.
[citation needed] Schelling's dynamics has been cited as a way of explaining variations that are found in what are regarded as meaningful differences – gender, age, race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, and religion.
Schelling's 1978 book Micromotives and Macrobehavior expanded on and generalized those themes[28][29] and is often cited in the literature of agent-based computational economics.
Stanley Kubrick read an article Schelling wrote that included a description of the Peter George novel Red Alert, and conversations between Kubrick, Schelling, and George eventually led to the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
[32] In his book Choice and Consequence,[33] he explored various topics such as nuclear terrorism, blackmail, daydreaming, and euthanasia, from a behavioral economics point of view.