Jack Ochs received his doctoral degree at Indiana University in 1968. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Urban Economics at Washington University in St. Louis for two years. Upon completing that fellowship, he joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh in 1970 where he remained until his retirement in 2012. His varied research interests are reflected in his publications in journals ranging from the Journal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Regional Science, the Canadian American Slavic Studies, and the Water Resource Bulletin to Econometrica, The American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy and Games and Economic Behavior.
He was convinced of the usefulness of behavioral experiments at a time when experimental economics was still a foreign subject to most economists. He was the first member of the department to engage in the use of behavioral experiments and he helped to build the department’s nationally recognized program in experimental economics. His work in that field, which he did in collaboration with colleagues, was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.
Postretirement he has remained active developing and presenting short courses for life-long learning programs at local universities.