Paul Milgrom

Paul Milgrom

Paul Robert Milgrom is an American economist. He is the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He won the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Robert B. Wilson, for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.

About Paul Milgrom in brief

Summary Paul MilgromPaul Robert Milgrom is an American economist. He is the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He won the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Robert B. Wilson, for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats. His work on auctions helped lay the groundwork for one of the most fruitful research areas in microeconomics over the last 30 years. He has also made important contributions to the study of asymmetric information and firm behavior in oligopolistic markets. He was part of a group of professors including future Nobel laureate Roger Myerson, Robert J. Weber, John Roberts and Mark Satterthwaite that helped to bring game theory and information economics to bear on a wide range of problems in economics such as pricing, auctions, financial markets, and industrial organization. In 1996, he gave the Nobel memorial lecture honoring the laureate William Vickrey, who had died three days after the Nobel prize announcement. He also led the team that designed the broadcast incentive auction between 2016 and 2017, which was a two-sided auction to reallocate radio frequencies from TV broadcast to wireless broadband uses. The jury citation for the BBVA Award wrote: “His work on auction theory is probably his best-known work on industrial organization, limit entry, pricing, and incentives. His research has explored issues of pricing, bidding, and bidding rules with different outcomes for different auctions with different rules and bidding and bidding outcomes.

He’s been equally influential in the field of market design, contracts and incentives, industrial economics, and game theory” He is also the co-founder of several companies, the most recent of which, Auctionomics, provides software and services for commercial auctions and exchanges. In 2012, he won a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Economy Award in the Finance and Finance and Management category for his contributions to an unusually broad range of fields of economics, including auctions, finance, finance and economics. He received the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics in 2008 for contributions dramatically expanding the understanding of the role of information and incentives in a variety of settings, such as auctions, the theory of the firm, and oligopolism markets. In 2009, he was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2011, he received the Econometric Society award for his work on the Theory of the Firm. In 2013, he became a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries in 1974. In 2014, he earned an MS in statistics in 1978 and a PhD in business in 1979. In 1987, he returned as an economics professor to his alma mater, Stanford University, where he is currently the Shirley & Leonard Ely professor of humanities and sciences in the Department of Economics. He worked as an actuary for several years in San Francisco at the Metropolitan Insurance Company and then at the Nelson and Warren consultancy in Columbus, Ohio. In 2015, he joined the Board of Trustees of the University of Michigan.