William Vickrey

William Spencer Vickrey (21 June 1914 – 11 October 1996) was a Canadian-American professor of economics. In 1996, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Mirrlees, They won the award for their research into the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information. Vickrey is the only person born in British Columbia to win a Nobel prize.^[source?].

William Vickrey
Born	(1914-06-21)21 June 1914 Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Died	11 October 1996(1996-10-11) (aged 82) Harrison, New York, U.S.
Nationality	Canada
Institution	Columbia University
Field	Public economics
School or tradition	Post Keynesian economics
Alma mater	Columbia University Yale University
Doctoral advisor	Carl Shoup Robert M. Haig
Doctoral students	David Colander Jacques Drèze
Influences	Henry George Harold Hotelling John Maynard Keynes
Contributions	Vickrey auction Revenue equivalence theorem Congestion pricing
Awards	Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1996) Guggenheim Fellowship (1955)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

The announcement of his Nobel Prize was made just three days before he died. Vickrey died during his journey to a conference of Georgist academics that he helped found. He had never missed one of these conferences in 20 years.^[1][2] His Nobel award was accepted by C. Lowell Harriss. Harriss worked with Vickrey at the Columbia University economics department. A Nobel Prize has only been awarded after the deaath of a person three other times.

Early years

Vickrey was born in Victoria, British Columbia. He attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Vickrey got his BS in Mathematics at Yale University in 1935. He got his MA in 1937. He also did Ph.D. in 1948 at Columbia University. He remained at Columbia for most of his career.

Personal life

Vickrey married Cecile Thompson in 1951. He was a Quaker. He is also a member of Scarsdale Friends Meeting.^[3] He died in Harrison, New York in 1996 from heart failure.

Selected works

• "Counterspeculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders", Journal of Finance, 1961. The paper originated auction theory, a subfield of game theory.
• "Fifteen Fatal Fallacies of Financial Fundamentalism: A Disquisition on Demand Side Economics". October 5, 1996.
• Arrow, Kenneth Joseph; Arnott, Richard J.; Atkinson, Anthony A.; Drèze, Jacques, eds. (1997). Public Economics: Selected Papers by William Vickrey. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-59763-0.
• Warner, Aaron W.; Forstater, Mathew; Rosen, Sumner M., eds. (2000). Commitment to Full Employment: The Economics and Social Policy of William S. Vickrey. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe. ISBN 978-0-7656-0633-4.
• Pavlina R. Tcherneva (2004). Full Employment and Price Stability: The Macroeconomic Vision of William S. Vickrey. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84376-409-0.