James A. Mirrlees
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
James A. Mirrlees
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1996
Born: 5 July 1936, Minnigaff, Scotland
Died: 29 August 2018, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Prize motivation: “for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
James Mirrlees was a Scottish economist, born in Minnigaff. He spent most of his childhood in Newton Stewart where he attended school. After he was done with school Mirrlees started his studies in Edinburgh but quickly moved to Cambridge on a scholarship. During his career he was a professor at different universities such as MIT, Oxford and mostly at Cambridge where he was working as a Cambridge chair until he passed away in 2018.
Work
James A. Mirrlees was awarded the Economic Sciences Prize in 1993, together with William Vickrey for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information. Mirrlees papers written during his time at Oxford University focused on asymmetric information. He was also a co-creator of the Diamond-Mirrlees efficiency theorem, created in 1971 and he specialized in optimal taxation.
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