1. William Spencer Vickrey was a Canadian-American professor of economics and Nobel Laureate.
20 Facts About William Vickrey
1. 2.
William Vickrey was a lifelong faculty member at Columbia University.
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William Vickrey originated the Vickrey auction, introduced the concept of congestion pricing in networks, formalized arguments for marginal cost pricing, and contributed to optimal income taxation.
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William Vickrey was awarded the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Mirrlees for their research into the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.
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William Vickrey was born in Victoria, British Columbia to Charles Vernon William Vickrey, a Congregationalist minister, and Ada Eliza Spencer.
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William Vickrey attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
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William Vickrey's students included the economists Jacques Dreze, Harvey J Levin, and Lynn Turgeon.
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William Vickrey was the first to use the tools of game theory to explain the dynamics of auctions.
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William Vickrey worked on congestion pricing, the notion that roads and other services should be priced so that users see the costs that arise from the service being fully used when there is still demand.
10.
In public economics, William Vickrey extended the marginal cost pricing approach of Harold Hotelling and showed how public goods should be provided at marginal cost.
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William Vickrey contended that efficient funding for public utilities and transportation systems required short-run marginal pricing, or pricing responsive to current demand.
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Alongside marginal cost pricing, William Vickrey argued that the land value tax was necessary to efficiently fund city services.
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William Vickrey wrote that replacing taxes on production and labor with fees for holding valuable land sites "would substantially improve the economic efficiency of the jurisdiction".
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William Vickrey further argued that land value tax had no adverse effects and that replacing existing taxes in this way would increase local productivity enough that land prices would rise instead of fall.
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William Vickrey made an ethical argument for Georgist value capture, noting that owners of valuable locations still take local public goods, even if they choose not to use them, so without land value tax, land users have to pay twice for those public services.
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William Vickrey was sharply critical of the Chicago school of economics and was vocal in opposing the political focus on achieving balanced budgets and fighting inflation, especially in times of high unemployment.
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William Vickrey became the only Nobel laureate born in British Columbia.
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William Vickrey died three days later while traveling to a conference of Georgist academics that he helped found.
19.
William Vickrey was a Quaker and a member of Scarsdale Friends Meeting.
20.
William Vickrey died in Harrison, New York in 1996 from heart failure.