19.96 James A. Mirrlees and William Vickrey

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1996 James A. Mirrlees and William Vickrey "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information"

During his time at Oxford, he published papers on economic models for which he would eventually be awarded his Nobel Prize. They centred on situations in which economic information is asymmetrical or incomplete, determining the extent to which they should affect the optimal rate of saving in an economy. Among other results, they demonstrated the principles of "moral hazard" and "optimal income taxation" discussed in the books of William Vickrey. The methodology has since become the standard in the field. Mirrlees and Vickrey shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information".