William Vickrey
| William Vickrey | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
21 June 1914 Victoria, British Columbia, Canada |
| Died | 11 October 1996 (aged 82) Harrison, New York, USA |
| Nationality | Canada |
| Institution | Columbia University |
| Field | Public economics |
| School or tradition |
Post Keynesian economics |
| Alma mater |
Columbia University Yale University |
| Doctoral students |
Jacques Drèze |
| Influences |
Henry George Harold Hotelling John Maynard Keynes |
| Influenced |
Harvey J. Levin Lynn Turgeon |
| Contributions |
Vickrey auction Revenue equivalence theorem Congestion pricing |
| Awards | Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1996) |
| Information at IDEAS / RePEc | |
William Spencer Vickrey (21 June 1914 – 11 October 1996) was a Canadian-born professor of economics and Nobel Laureate. Vickrey was awarded the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Mirrlees for their research into the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information, becoming the only Nobel laureate born in British Columbia.
The announcement of his Nobel prize was made just three days prior to his death. Vickrey died while traveling to a conference of Georgist academics that he helped found and never missed once in 20 years. His Columbia University economics department colleague C. Lowell Harriss accepted the posthumous prize on his behalf. There are only three other cases where a Nobel Prize has been presented posthumously.
Vickrey was born in Victoria, British Columbia and attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After obtaining his B.S. in Mathematics at Yale University in 1935, he went on to complete his M.A. in 1937 and Ph.D. in 1948 at Columbia University, where he remained for most of his career.
Vickrey was the first to use the tools of game theory to explain the dynamics of auctions. In his seminal paper, Vickrey derived several auction equilibria, and provided an early revenue-equivalence result. The revenue equivalence theorem remains the centrepiece of modern auction theory. The Vickrey auction is named after him.
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