Fisher attended Harvard University, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1955 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree 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. Fisher married Ellen Paradise Fisher in 1958. They had three children and eight grandchildren. He was Teaching Fellow at Harvard from 1956 to 1957, Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, Assistant Professor of Economics at MIT, Associate Professor of Economics at MIT, and Professor of Economics at MIT from 1965 to 2004. He retired as the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics, Emeritus at MIT. He was a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research starting in 1989. Fisher's fields of specialization within economics were industrial organization, microeconomics, and econometrics. He wrote extensively in the area of antitrust economics. 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. Fisher died on April 29, 2019 from complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was 84.
Publications
Fisher was the author or co-author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books. He wrote books addressing antitrust issues. In 1983, he co-authored Folded, Spindled and Mutilated: Economic Analysis and U.S. vs. IBM. The book is about the antitrust case U.S. vs. IBM, in which Fisher was the lead expert economist for the defense. 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:
