William Vickrey
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William Spencer Vickrey (born June 21, 1914 in Victoria, British Columbia - died October 11, 1996 in New York State) was a Columbia University professor, whose Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was announced just three days before he died.
Vickrey was awarded the prize jointly with James Mirrlees for research into the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information. An example of this is the situation where, for instance, the insured know more about their health than their insurer.
William Vickrey authored the seminal 1961 Journal of Finance paper, "Counterspeculation, auctions and competitive sealed tenders.", which was the first instance of an economist using the tools of game theory to understand auctions. In the paper, which has been described as being two decades ahead of its time, Vickrey not only derives several auction equilibria, but also provides an early revenue equivalence result. The revenue equivalence theorem remains the centrepiece of modern auction theory. The Vickrey auction is named after him.
He also did important work in congestion pricing, the idea that roads and other services should be priced so that users see the costs that arise from the service being fully used when there is still demand. Congestion pricing gives a signal to users to adjust their behaviour or to investors to expand the service in order to remove the constraint. His theory was later partially put into action in London.
Vickrey attended Yale College and did his graduate work at Columbia University.
Among his prominent graduate students and proteges at Columbia were economists Lynn Turgeon and Harvey J. Levin.
[edit] See also
- Road pricing
- London congestion charge
- Electricity market
- List of economists
- List of think tanks
- Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
[edit] External links
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: List of Laureates |
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Milton Friedman (1976) • Bertil Ohlin / James Meade (1977) • Herbert Simon (1978) • Theodore Schultz / Arthur Lewis (1979) • Lawrence Klein (1980) • James Tobin (1981) • George Stigler (1982) • Gérard Debreu (1983) • Richard Stone (1984) • Franco Modigliani (1985) • James M. Buchanan (1986) • Robert Solow (1987) • Maurice Allais (1988) • Trygve Haavelmo (1989) • Harry Markowitz / Merton Miller / William Forsyth Sharpe (1990) • Ronald Coase (1991) • Gary Becker (1992) • Robert Fogel / Douglass North (1993) • John Harsanyi / John Forbes Nash / Reinhard Selten (1994) • Robert Lucas, Jr. (1995) • James Mirrlees / William Vickrey (1996) • Robert C. Merton / Myron Scholes (1997) • Amartya Sen (1998) • Robert Mundell (1999) • James Heckman / Daniel McFadden (2000) |
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