2014 Nemmers Prize in Economics Recipient

Jean Tirole

Foundation Jean-Jacques Laffont/Toulouse School of Economics and Institute for Industrial Economics, University of Toulouse Capitole

For various contributions to economic theory and its application to finance, industrial organization and behavioral economics

Official press release

As one of the world’s leading economists, Tirole has been influential in the theoretical and practical application of game theory and information theory to industrial organization and regulation. His research interests also include finance, macroeconomics, international finance, economics and psychology.

Tirole also serves as chairman of the executive committee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), which he helped found in 2011. He is an annual visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the department of economics, where he was a professor for eight years before moving to Toulouse in 1992.

Tirole has given more than 70 distinguished lectures and has published approximately 200 articles in economics and finance.

In 2013 Tirole and co-author Roland Bénabou’s article “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation” was selected by The Review of Economic Studies as one of 11 most influential papers in the journal’s 80-year history. That same year, he also received the Stephen A. Ross Prize in Financial Economics, with colleague Bengt Holmström, for “Private and Public Supply of Liquidity” published in the Journal of Political Economy.

Tirole is the author of 11 books including “Inside and Outside Liquidity” with Bengt Holmström (2011); “The Theory of Industrial Organization” (1988); “Game Theory” with Drew Fudenberg (1991); “A Theory of Incentives in Regulation and Procurement” with Jean-Jacques Laffont (1993); and “The Theory of Corporate Finance” (2006), for which he received an honorable mention for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Finance & Economics from the Association of American Publishers.

Tirole holds honorary doctorates from Université de Lausanne (2013); Hitotsubashi University (2013); the University of Rome 2 (2012); the Athens School of Business and Economics (2012); the University of Mannheim (2011); HEC Montreal (2007); the London Business School (2007); and the Free University in Brussels (1989).

Among other prizes and honors, Tirole received the Yrjö Jahnsson prize of the European Economic Association (granted every other year to an economist under the age of 45 who has made a contribution in theoretical and applied research that is significant to economics in Europe) in 1993, and the gold medal of the CNRS in 2007 (the second economist, after Allais in 1978, to receive this medal, attributed to one researcher every year since 1954). He was the inaugural winner of the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Awards in economics, finance and management in 2008. He also received the CME Group -- Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Prize in Innovation Quantitative Applications and the Claude Levi-Strauss Prize for his significant contributions to the social sciences -- both in 2010.

He was president of the Econometric Society in 1998 and of the European Economic Association in 2001. Tirole is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Economic Association.

Past winners of the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics are: Daron Acemoglu (2012); Elhanan Helpman (2010); Paul Milgrom (2008); Lars Peter Hansen (2006); Ariel Rubinstein (2004); Edward C. Prescott (2002), Nobel Laureate 2004; Daniel McFadden (2000), Nobel Laureate 2000; Robert Aumann, (1998), Nobel Laureate 2005; Thomas Sargent (1996), Nobel Laureate 2011; and Peter Diamond (1994), Nobel Laureate 2010.