William Vickrey
William Vickrey | |
|---|---|
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1996) | |
| Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
William Spencer Vickrey (21 June 1914 – 11 October 1996) was a Canadian-American professor of economics and
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
Ralph Steinman (Physiology or Medicine 2011).[3]
Early years
Vickrey was born in
PhD in 1948 at Columbia University
, where he remained for most of his career.
Career
Vickrey was the first to use the tools of
revenue equivalence theorem remains the centrepiece of modern auction theory. The Vickrey auction is named after him.[4]
Vickrey worked on congestion pricing, the notion 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.[5][6][7][8] Congestion pricing gives a signal to users to adjust their behavior or to investors to expand the service in order to remove the constraint. The theory was later partially put into action in London.
In
Georgist value capture, noting that owners of valuable locations still take (exclude others from) local public goods, even if they choose not to use them, so without land value tax, land users have to pay twice for those public services (once in tax to government and once in rent to holders of land title).[11]
Vickrey's
General MacArthur, Vickrey helped accomplish radical land reform in Japan.[13]
Vickrey had many graduate students and protegés at Columbia University, including the economists Jacques Drèze, Harvey J. Levin,[14] and Lynn Turgeon.[15]
Personal life
Vickrey married Cecile Thompson in 1951. He was a
in 1996 from heart failure.Selected works
Articles
- Vickrey, William (1961). "Counterspeculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders". Journal of Finance. The paper originated auction theory, a subfield of game theory.
- Vickrey, William (1963). "Pricing in Urban and Suburban Transport". American Economic Review. 53 (2): 452–465.
- Vickrey, William (1969). "Congestion Theory and Transport Investment". American Economic Review. 59 (2): 251–260.
- Vickrey, William (1977). "The City as a Firm". In Feldstein, Martin; Inman, Robert P (eds.). The Economics of Public Services. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 334–343.
Essays
- "Fifteen Fatal Fallacies of Financial Fundamentalism: A Disquisition on Demand Side Economics". October 5, 1996.
Collected works
- 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.
See also
References
- ^ Netzer, Dick (November 1996). "Remembering William Vickrey". Land Lines. 8 (6). Retrieved 2 September 2016.
- ^ Gaffney, Mason. "Warm Memories of Bill Vickrey". Land & Liberty. Retrieved 15 November 2016.
- ^ "Nobel Prize facts". The Nobel Prize. Retrieved 18 September 2023.
Section Posthumous Nobel Prizes
- ^ a b Vickrey, 1961
- ^ "Nobelist William S. Vickrey: Practical Economic Solutions to Urban Problems". Columbia University. 1996-10-08. Retrieved 2009-03-27.
- ^ Daniel Gross (2007-02-17). "What's the Toll? It Depends on the Time of Day". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-07-15.
- ^ Victoria Transport Policy Institute (1992). "Principles of Efficient Congestion Pricing – William Vickrey". Victoria Transport Policy Institute. Retrieved 2009-03-10.
{{cite web}}:|author=has generic name (help) - ^ Harford, Tim (13 November 2019). "Is surge pricing a fair way to manage demand?". BBC News.
- ^ Red-Light Taxes and Green-Light Taxes Mason Gaffney For the Conference, "Sharing Our Common Heritage: Resource Taxes and Green Dividends" Mansfield College, Oxford, 14 May 1998 http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Gaffney_RLT&GLT.html Quote: "Georgists need to introspect deeply over this case, and many like it, and master the theory and practice of marginal-cost pricing as developed so ably by closet Georgist economists like Harold Hotelling and William Vickrey."
- ^ Vickrey, William. "The Corporate Income Tax in the U.S. Tax System, 73 TAX NOTES 597, 603 (1996). Quote: "Removing almost all business taxes, including property taxes on improvements, excepting only taxes reflecting the marginal social cost of public services rendered to specific activities, and replacing them with taxes on site values, would substantially improve the economic efficiency of the jurisdiction."
- ^ Vickrey, William. Remarks at The Henry George School of New York, 1993. http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/land-question_t-z.htm
- ^ Turgeon, Lynn. Bastard Keynesianism : the evolution of economic thinking and policymaking since World War II. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1997
- ^ Gaffney, Mason. The corruption of economics. London: Shepheard-Walwyn in association with Centre for Incentive Taxation, 2006 http://masongaffney.org/publications/K1Neo-classical_Stratagem.CV.pdf
- ^ "Harvey J. Levin".
- ^ "Lynn Turgeon". The New York Times. 16 March 1999.
- ^ "William Vickrey - Biographical".
Further reading
- Arnott, Richard (October 1997). "William Vickrey; Contributions to Public Policy" (PDF).
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - Richard Arnott; Anthony B. Atkinson; Kenneth Arrow; Jacques H. Drèze, eds. (1994). Public Economics; Selected Papers by William Vickrey. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521454391.
- Warsh, David (14 October 1996). "Laureate's untimely death a 'cosmic ripoff'". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 18 September 2023.
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to William Vickrey.
- William Vickrey on Nobelprize.org
- IDEAS/RePEc
- "William S. Vickrey (1914–1996)". Library of Economics and Liberty (2nd ed.). Liberty Fund. 2008.
- "William Vickrey". JSTOR.
- Jacques H. Dreze, "William S. Vickrey", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (1998)
