William Vickery and James A. Mirrlees Shared 1996 Nobel Prize for Contributions to Economic Theory of Incentives

William Vickery, a member of the NBER Board of Directors, shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1996 with James A. Mirrlees for what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described as “their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information."

Vickery specialized in auction theory and introduced the idea of using differential pricing to relieve traffic congestion at peak times and in high-traffic locations. He proposed increasing tolls at peak times and lowering them at others. While the proposal was not embraced, his suggestion that such a system could work through electronic identifier units carried in each vehicle, which would activate recording devices in or on the road, is at the core of the E-ZPass system. Mirrlees specialized in optimal taxation and was a cocreator of the Diamond-Mirrlees efficiency theorem.

Vickery was McVickar Professor of Political Economy Emeritus at Columbia University at the time of the award. Mirrlees was professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge. 

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