William Vickrey
Canadian-American economist and Nobel laureate known for auction theory, congestion pricing, and marginal cost pricing.
William Spencer Vickrey was a Canadian-American economist born on 21 June 1914 in Victoria, British Columbia.[1][2] He spent his entire academic career at Columbia University, where he worked on public economics and mechanism design.[1] The Vickrey auction was his creation, and he also pioneered the idea of pricing to manage network congestion.[1]
Quick Facts
- Born
- 21 June 1914
- Birthplace
- Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
- Died
- 11 October 1996
- Place of death
- Harrison, New York, U.S.
- Institution
- Columbia University
- Field
- Social choice theory and mechanism design
- School of thought
- Georgist
- Doctoral advisor
- Carl Shoup; Robert M. Haig
Facts from the source article.
Life and work
Vickrey's father was a Congregationalist minister, and the family moved to New York City during William's childhood.[2] He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then earned a B.S. in Mathematics from Yale in 1935.[3][4] Vickrey completed his M.A. at Columbia in 1937 and a PhD there in 1948 with a dissertation on progressive taxation.[3] His doctoral work was interrupted by World War II service for the U.S. National Resources Planning Board and the Treasury Department.[3]
Vickrey began his Columbia career as a lecturer in economics in 1946.[4] Vickrey was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics but died three days after the announcement.[5] In 1951, Vickrey wed Cecile Thompson, and he was a Quaker who belonged to the Scarsdale Friends Meeting.[6] Heart failure caused his death in 1996 in Harrison, New York.[6]
C. Lowell Harriss, a fellow economist at Columbia, received the Nobel Prize for Vickrey after his death.[7]
What the cited sources add
A 1992 account by Litman calls Vickrey the father of congestion pricing.[4] Litman states that Vickrey considered time-of-day pricing a classic application of market forces to balance supply and demand.[4] Vickrey's 1993 remarks at the Henry George School note that economists are almost unanimous in conceding the land tax has no adverse side effects.[8] The Lincoln Institute's 1996 remembrance reports that Vickrey died while traveling to the annual conference of the Committee on Taxation, Resources and Economic Development.[5]
That same source describes Vickrey as the ultimate intellectual sparkplug of TRED from its beginning.[5] A colleague quoted in the remembrance said "Bill Vickrey lived his life exactly as he wished, right to the end".[5]
References
- Wikipedia, "William Vickrey" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Arnott, "William Vickrey; Contributions to Public Policy", International Tax and Public Finance, February 1998, p. 95–113 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "William Vickrey" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Read, "The Public Financiers: Ricardo, George, Clark, Ramsey, Mirrlees, Vickrey, Wicksell, Musgrave, Buchanan, Tiebout, and Stiglitz", Springer, 2016 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "William Vickrey" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Arnott, "William Vickrey; Contributions to Public Policy", International Tax and Public Finance, February 1998, p. 95–113; Read, "The Public Financiers: Ricardo, George, Clark, Ramsey, Mirrlees, Vickrey, Wicksell, Musgrave, Buchanan, Tiebout, and Stiglitz", Springer, 2016 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Litman, "Principles of Efficient Congestion Pricing – William Vickrey", Victoria Transport Policy Institute, 1992. facts only, no text reused. vtpi.org
- Netzer, "Remembering William Vickrey", November 1996. facts only, no text reused. lincolninst.edu
- Wikipedia, "William Vickrey" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "William Vickrey – Biographical" (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "William Vickrey" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Netzer, "Remembering William Vickrey", November 1996; Gaffney, "Warm Memories of Bill Vickrey", Land & Liberty (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
- Vickrey, William. Remarks at The Henry George School of New York, 1993. http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/land-question_t-z.htm. facts only, no text reused. cooperative-individualism.org
Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article William Vickrey (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.
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