French economist Jean Tirole yesterday won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, or the Nobel Prize in Economics, for research on market power and regulation.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Tirole for clarifying “how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms.”
Tirole, 61, works at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and has a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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“From the mid-1980s and onward, Jean Tirole has breathed new life into research on such market failures,” the academy said, adding that Tirole’s work has strong bearing on how governments deal with mergers or cartels and how they should regulate monopolies.
“In a series of articles and books, Jean Tirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking,” the academy said.
It was the first economics prize without a US winner since 1999.
“I am so moved,” Tirole said, speaking to a news conference in Stockholm by telephone from Toulouse.
Before Tirole’s theories, policymakers advocated simple rules including capping prices for companies with a monopoly and banning cooperation between competitors, the academy said. Tirole showed that in some circumstances, such rules can do more harm than good, it added.
Drawing on insights based on Tirole’s work, “governments can better encourage powerful firms to become more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors and customers,” the academy said.
The economics prize completed this year’s Nobel Prize announcements. The awards are to be presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.
The economics award was added to the rankings in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank.
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