Nobel Week Dialogue
Jean Tirole
Jean Tirole works in industrial organisation, regulation, game theory, corporate finance, banking and currency crises, and psychology-based economics. His 2014 prize in economic sciences focused on market regulation.
Jean Tirole was born in Troyes in France. After studying engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, he turned his interests to economics and mathematics. In 1981 he received his doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US. He was a professor of economics at MIT from 1984 to 1991 and maintained his connections there since. Since 1992 he has worked at the Toulouse School of Economics.
Tirole works in industrial organisation, regulation, game theory, corporate finance, banking and currency crises, and psychology-based economics. His 2014 prize in economic sciences focused on market regulation. If markets dominated by a small number of companies are left unregulated, society often suffers negative consequences. Prices can become unjustifiably high, new companies can be prevented from entering the market, and innovation sags. Since the mid-1980s, Tirole has suggested a framework for designing regulations and has applied it to several industries, from banking to telecommunications, to digital platforms, and to payment systems.
