William Vickrey

Infobox Scientist
name = William Vickrey


image_size = 180px
birth_date = birth date|1914|6|21|mf=y
birth_place = Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
death_date = death date and age|1996|10|11|1914|6|21|mf=y
death_place = Harrison, New York, USA
nationality = Canada
field = Economics
work_institution = Columbia University 1946-82
alma_mater = Columbia University PhD 1948
Yale University BA 1935
doctoral_advisor = Robert Murray Haig
doctoral_students =
known_for = Moral hazard Revenue equivalence theorem Congestion pricing
prizes = Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1996)

William Spencer Vickrey (June 21, 1914, Victoria, British Columbia - October 11, 1996, New York State) , US citizen in 1945, 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.

He was in his economic thought inspiredby John Maynard Keynes and a sharp critic of
Chicago School (economics) and the political focus on balanced budgets and inflation in times with great repression and unemployment.

Vickrey attended Phillips Academy, Andover and Yale College, and did his graduate work at Columbia University.

Among his prominent graduate students and proteges at Columbia were economists Lynn Turgeon and [http://www.harveyjlevin.com Harvey J. Levin] .

ee also

* Vickrey auction
* Road pricing
* London congestion charge
* Electricity market
* List of economists
* List of think tanks
* Georgism

External links

* [http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/wp/econ/vickrey.html William Vickrey: 15 fatal fallacies of financial fundamentalism]
* [http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1996/vickrey-bio.html Nobel Laureate Biography of William Vickrey]
* [http://ideas.repec.org/e/pvi9.html IDEAS/RePEc]