Graeme Wearden 

Jean Tirole wins the Nobel prize in economic sciences – as it happened

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is being awarded in Stockholm now – follow it live here
  
  

Live coverage of the 2014 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

And that’s a good time to stop.

Reminder. Our summary of why Jean Tirole won is here.

Rolling reaction starts here.

And video clips of the announcement are here

Thanks for reading and commenting today, and for following the Guardian’s coverage of the Nobel Prizes this year. Goodbye!

Jean Tirole, in his own words

And finally, over to the man himself.

The Nobel Prize team have uploaded in interview with Jean Tirole, in which he explains how he told his wife about his win, and then his mother:

Oh, I first, to be honest, she is 90 years old and I first ask her to sit before I told her of the news.

[Laughs] So, but yes, she was, my mother used to be a teacher, French and Latin and Greek teacher. You know, knowledge is very important to her, very important. And of course, for my wife and my children also. I see one of my daughters is on Skype with me from London and in fact it is actually quite moving for the whole family of course.

Tirole also shows why he has a reputation as such decent bloke by hailing former colleague Jean-Jacques Laffont, who died in 2004, as his “mentor” and “dear friend”.

Jean-Jacques Laffont passed away.. and deserved to be with me today in this Prize for regulation and competition policy.

Now the Nobel awards are over, Swedish newpaper The Local has announced its Alternative Nobel Prize list.

Here’s a flavour:

Worst Example of Gender Equality: We weren’t impressed by the not-very-noble fact that there were only two female winners out of a total 13 laureates. But considering there have been hardly any women Laureates at all in the past, we’re moving in the right direction.

Most Helpful Simile: The Nobel Committee in Chemistry did a good job in helping us all understand the laureates’ work with microscope and molecules. They compared it to looking at a city of buildings but not being able to see the people inside them. The laureates’ work allowed us to see these “people” inside. Still don’t get it? Read more.

Best Laureate Name: Professor Hell, who took home the prize in Physics.

Roll on 2015!

Here’s the full list: The Local’s alternative guide to the Nobel Prizes

Updated

EC vice-president Almunia: We owe Tirole so much

European Commission Vice President Joaquín Almunia, who leads competition policy across the EU, has “warmly congratulated” Jean Tirole.

Almunia, who has probed Google for years and announced huge fines on Europe’s banks for market abuses, says Tirole’s work has made a difference.

“For competition enforcers, his work has been of major importance. He is one of the sharpest economic theorists having contributed to our understanding of market power and how regulation may effectively curb it.

We owe Jean Tirole so much. His work has been central to the economic analysis underpinning many of our instruments in competition policy and beyond. This includes work on vertical agreements, mergers, competition in network industries and so much more. I finally also wish to pay tribute to Jean Tirole’s renowned humility.”

US professor Tyler Cowen also mentioned that Tirole is a “very nice person” (see earlier post). A victory for the good guys?

OK, here’s your homework, class.

The Council for Foreign Relations has rounded up links to many of Jean Tirole’s papers on competition policy and regulation. They’re looking for intelligent comments on them too:

New Nobel Economics Winner Jean Tirole on Energy, Climate, and Environment

Here’s another photo showing Jean Tirole, right, being congratulated by colleagues at the Toulouse School of Economics:

Over in Quartz, Tim Fernholz has explained how Jean Tirole’s work has plenty of applications for politicians grappling with new technology.

Used correctly, it helps governments get to grips with new platforms such as Netflix, and understand why some software is released under open source licences.

In countries—indeed, in most of the world—where it is assumed that market competition generates the most prosperity, there are still markets that allow monopolies or near-monopolies: communications and transportation networks, military materiel, natural resources. Governments need strategies to regulate monopolistic behavior and prevent dominant companies from jacking up prices on everyone, but they also need to avoid forcing prices so low as to make the business unsustainable.

They need, in effect, to simulate competition without having all the information to do so, the Achilles’ heel of central planning.

Tirole and his collaborators have for decades been using game theory to understand this problem....more here

Jean Tirole has enjoyed a hero’s welcome back in Toulouse, as this photo shows:

You can watch the Nobel Prize announcement here

If you missed today’s announcement, don’t worry. The Nobel Prize team have done a brilliant job uploading video clips explaining why Jean Tirole won.

Here are some of the best:

Check out their twitter feed for more.

Updated

Larry Elliott: Regulators should heed Tirole's work

Our economics editor, Larry Elliott, is on sparkling form explaining why Jean Tirole’s work deserves such recognition.

Here’s a flavour:

It could be argued that Google’s Eric Schmidt is as powerful today as John D Rockefeller was when he was at the helm of Standard Oil. Booksellers worry about the dominance of Amazon.

What the judges liked about Tirole was that his work goes beyond dispensing general advice to regulators about how to prevent market abuses. Rather, he insists that there is no one size-fits-all solution, and that each industry must be regulated according to its own structure. What is needed for banking will differ from what’s needed for the online search sector.

Often, it is hard to see the relevance of the economics Nobel to the real world. This is not one of those years, because Tirole’s work has a practical application. Regulators should take heed - and act.

More here: Why Jean Tirole’s work matters in the Age of Google

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has also welcomed France’s double success at this year’s Nobel awards, tweeting that:

“After Patrick Modiano, another Frenchman in the firmament. Congratulations to Jean Tirole. A thumb in the eye for French bashing,”

Updated

George Cooper: Tirole's success is a sign of progress

George Cooper, the financial author (see previous post), agrees with Tyler Cowen that the Swedish Academy have made a good choice.

Handing the prize to Jean Tirole, for his work on effective regulation, is an “implicit recognition that markets are not efficient” and that regulation is necessary, said Cooper.

He adds:

“Moving beyond the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) dogma is a is sign of progress.”

One of last year’s winners, Eugene Fama, helped to develop the EMH.

Updated

Danny Blanchflower, labour market economist and former Bank of England policymaker, has criticised the choice of Jean Tirole.

He suggests that the judges should reward economists who discover actual laws that work in the real economy, rather than those who merely theorise:

If this issue takes your fancy, may I recommend reading Money, Blood and Revolution by George Cooper?

It argues that economics is in crisis, and “living in a kind of Alice in Wonderland state believing in multiple, inconsistent, things at the same time.”

The premise of this book is that:

the internal inconsistencies between economic theories - the apparently unresolvable debates between leading economists and the incoherent policies of our governments - are symptomatic of economics being in a crisis.....

But George comes up with some encouraging solutions. It’s a great read (with some good jokes too)

Updated

A nice photo of Jean Tirole at work:

It’s been a good few days for France -- Tirole follows compatriot Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

Can this be the same France that was dismissed as a washed-up, ‘finished’ economy by the boss of UK retail chain John Lewis earlier this month?

Tyler Cowen also explained how Jean Tirole’s work examines how contractors can sometimes sting governments by demanding extra fees to deliver a contract on time:

Tyler Cowen: Tirole is a great choice (and a very nice person)

“An excellent and well-deserved pick.”

That’s how US economics professor Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, responded to the news that French professor Jean Tirole has won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.

Cowen also explains (rather better than I can), why Tirole is a worthy winner:

A theory prize! A rigor prize! I would say it is about principal-agent theory and the increasing mathematization of formal propositions as a way of understanding economics. He has been a leading figure in formalizing propositions in many distinct areas of microeconomics, most of all industrial organization but also finance and financial regulation and behavioral economics and even some public choice too. He is a broader economist than many of his fans realize.

Tirole is a Frenchman, he teaches at Toulouse, and his key papers start in the 1980s. In industrial organization, you can think of him as extending the earlier work of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson with regard to opportunism and recontracting, but applying more sophisticated and more mathematical forms of game theory. Tirole also has been a central figure in procurement theory and optimal contracts when there is asymmetric information about costs. The idea of mechanism design runs throughout his papers in many different guises. Many of his papers show “it’s complicated,” rather than presenting easily summarizable, intuitive solutions which make for good blog posts. That is one reason why his ideas do not show up so often in blogs and the popular press, but they nonetheless have been extremely influential in the economics profession. He has shown a remarkable breadth and depth over the course of the last thirty or so years.....

Cowen adds that Tirole is renowned as an excellent teacher and a very nice person.

The full piece is worth a read.

Updated

Here’s our City editor Jill Treanor on today’s award:

Jean Tirole – the French economist who has used game theory in an attempt to find ways to control the dominance of major companies – has won the Nobel prize for economics.

Tirole, of the University of Toulouse, said he was very grateful for the award for his work on “taming powerful firms”.

The committee, which awarded the Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, selected an area of economics that has become increasingly important, as governments have privatised former public monopolies, like water, electricity and telecoms.....

Jill’s full story: Jean Tirole wins Nobel prize for economics 2014

Moscovici: Bravo Jean!

Pierre Moscovici, the former French finance minister, has offered his congratulations to Jean Tirole.

Moscovici, who is now joining the EU commission as finance chief, adds that Tirole’s work “informs the paths we need to follow to get out of the crisis”.

Updated

Tore Ellingsen, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Economy, has given an interview explaining that Jean Tirole won his prize for his work on “market power and regulation”.

Small firms want to become big. But once you are a big firm, the profit market is maybe not benign. You may want to dominate the market, to exploit your customers, to exclude competitors.

So the question is, what kind of regulation and competition policy do you want to put in place, so that large and mighty firms will act in society’s best interests.

Tirole is primarily a theorist, using game theory to examine the behaviour of competitors who know they have an impact on each other, Ellingson explains.

And his work is still ongoing - he’s not retired yet!

Here’s the full interview (about seven minutes long)

Updated

The Swedish Academy also produced a nifty graphic, showing how regulators can struggle to keep a monopoly in check if they haven’t got all the information the need (thus the blindfold):

Summary: Nobel Triumph for Jean Tirole

Professor Jean Tirole of the Toulouse School of Economics in France, has been awarded the prestigious Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

  • Tirole was recognised for his work on how to regulate industries that are dominated by a few powerful firms.
  • The Swedish Academy said the 61-year old Tirole had led the advancement of work in the area of how to control cartels and monopolies.
  • This a crucial area of policy since the privatisations and deregulations seen since the 1980s. It is also a hot topic today, as Brussels tries to regulate web giants such as Google and control the banking sector.
  • The Academy explained that Tirole’s work had moved beyond simple models where prices were capped caps and firms could be banned from sharing information.

In its citation, the Academy says:

Tirole showed theoretically that such rules may work well in certain conditions, but do more harm than good in others. Price caps can provide dominant firms with strong motives to reduce costs – a good thing for society – but may also permit excessive profits – a bad thing for society. Cooperation on price setting within a market is usually harmful, but cooperation regarding patent pools can benefit everyone.

The merger of a firm and its supplier may encourage innovation, but may also distort competition.

The best regulation or competition policy should therefore be carefully adapted to every industry’s specific conditions. In a series of articles and books, Jean Tirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking. Drawing on these new insights, governments can better encourage powerful firms to become more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors and customers.

And the beauty of Tirole’s work, they explained, is that it understands that different industries, such as telecoms and banking, should not be regulated the same way.

  • Tirole became the 75th person to win the unofficial ‘Nobel prize for economics’. He slightly lowers the average age of winners (67), and brings Europe’s total of winners (now 24) closer to America (47). The gender gap remains wide, though, with just one female winner since 1969 (Eleanor Ostrom).

Speaking as the announcement was made, Tirole said he was “so moved”.

He explains that his work shows that regulators must ensure that dynamic new rivals are free to take on a mighty company such as Google,

Winning the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is clearly an emotional moment - the highlight of many glittering careers....

The Swedish Academy of Sciences are collecting messages of congratulation to Jean Tirole, here.

And that was the end of the press conference - Jean Tirole heads off to celebrate.

Last question -- is this effectively a political choice, given that regulating Europe’s banking sector is such a hot topic today?

The Academy give a cute answer -- it is “not to a very large extent” a political choice.

They give the example of engineering -- a government decides to build a new bridge, and it’s the engineer’s job to make sure it’s safe. In competition policy, Tirole et al are the engineers.

The plaudits are coming in....

Why Tirole, and why now?

The Academy explains that the area of mergers, cartels, and monopoly regulation has become much more important since the 1980s, when government began to deregulate ‘natural monopolies’.

The rise of the EU single market also made this area more significant.

The work that Jean Tirole and colleagues has done has played a major role in his field.

And how can your work be used in banking sector, professor?

Tirole cites the lessons of the financial crisis, which showed how counterparty risk fuelled the near meltdown of the banking system.

Insurance giant AIG, for example, had to be bailed out because its collapse would have had immense consequences for the system.

An example of Too Big To Fail....

Jean Tirole: How my work can keep Google in check

Professor Tirole is asked how his work can be used to keep a web giant like Google in check.

Tirole explains that his team have shown is that the antitrust economics of such markets, such as web search or credit/debit card supply, are different from other economies.

Often you have prices that are way below cost -- as a customer you get a very good deal from Google, while advertisers, pay a lot, Tirole explains.

In the credit card industry, Merchants pays a lot, and cardholders get a lot.

The danger comes when you see predatory, or antitrust pricing, says Tirole, who breaks away to apologise if he’s “speaking too fast with the emotion.”

No no, carry on, sir

Such industries have a natural tendancy to become a monopoly, which is not itself a bad thing as long as it’s possible for more dynamic firms to replace them. Regulators need to make sure that can happen, Tirole adds.

Nobel Prize winner Tirole: I'm so moved by this news

Tirole is on the telephone line now -- saying that he is “so moved” by the award that he may not be able to answer questions. But he’ll try.

Why Jean Tirole won the Nobel Prize for economics

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says Tirole is “one of the most influential economists of our time”.

One of our “greatest living economists”, who has made a huge contribution to economics.

His contribution to economic science is in understanding, and explaining, how to control industries with a few powerful firms.

In other words, his work has helped prevent Big Businesses from exploiting the rest of us.

The Academy adds:

Many industries are dominated by a small number of large firms or a single monopoly. Left unregulated, such markets often produce socially undesirable results – prices higher than those motivated by costs, or unproductive firms that survive by blocking the entry of new and more productive ones.

From the mid-1980s and onwards, Jean Tirole has breathed new life into research on such market failures. His analysis of firms with market power provides a unified theory with a strong bearing on central policy questions: how should the government deal with mergers or cartels, and how should it regulate monopolies?

Before Tirole, researchers and policymakers sought general principles for all industries. They advocated simple policy rules, such as capping prices for monopolists and prohibiting cooperation between competitors, while permitting cooperation between firms with different positions in the value chain. Tirole showed theoretically that such rules may work well in certain conditions, but do more harm than good in others. Price caps can provide dominant firms with strong motives to reduce costs – a good thing for society – but may also permit excessive profits – a bad thing for society. Cooperation on price setting within a market is usually harmful, but cooperation regarding patent pools can benefit everyone. The merger of a firm and its supplier may encourage innovation, but may also distort competition.

The best regulation or competition policy should therefore be carefully adapted to every industry’s specific conditions. In a series of articles and books, Jean Tirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking. Drawing on these new insights, governments can better encourage powerful firms to become more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors and customers.

Updated

Tirole, working with other economists, helped to analyse how regulators are hampered by ‘asymmetric information’ -- ie, the big company has a better idea about what’s happening in their market than the regulator themselves.

Tirole, of Toulouse University, has received the award for his work on how to regulate large firms, the Academy explains.

He has played a major role examining competition, and analysing how large firms should be regulated to prevent consumers being damaged by monopoly behaviour.

Jean Tirole wins Nobel Prize for Economics

And the winner is: Jean Tirole, the French economist, for his work on market power and regulation.

He is being recognised for his work taming powerful firms.

Staffan Normark, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, is announcing today’s choice - in Swedish and then English.....

Here we go......

Just five minutes to go!

Reminder, there’s a live feed from Stockholm playing at the top of this blog (also streaming on YouTube here)

And the information should be posted on the Nobel Prize website (right-click to open in a new tab)

Twitter is buzzing with guesses too:

Tension is building in the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, in Stockholm, as the clock ticks towards noon BST.

If you play the embedded video at the top of this page, you can hear the quiet chatter in the Session Hall.

The plan is that Staffan Normark, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announces the names of the winner, or winners, followed by an explanation of why they have been honoured...

And here’s a fine chart from our Graphics department, showing the history of the Nobel Prizes in numbers:

Stockholm-based journalist Oliver Gee has crunched the numbers:

A few facts about the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science

The Nobel Prize team must have known we’d have some dead air to fill before the winner is announced in an hour’s time, as they’ve created a list of facts about previous winners.

For example....

  • 74 people have won the award since it was first handed over in 1969. On 22 occasions, a single proud recipient was left blinking in the limelight, while it has been split two ways 17 times, and three ways twice.
  • Famous winners include Dr John Nash, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Milton Friedman and Friedrich August von Hayek
  • More than half of the winners have been American:
  • American economist Kenneth Arrow became the youngest winner, aged 51, in 1972.
  • Moscow-born Leonid Hurwicz became the oldest, at 90, in 2007 (he died the following year)
  • The average age of the winners is 67.
  • And there’s only been one female winner, Elinor Ostrom, in 2009.

Fancy winning the Nobel prize for economics yourself? These are the areas that have found favour in previous years:

Another option is Robert Barro of Harvard, who was recently ranked the third most influential economist in the world.

Guy Bentley of City AM adds:

He is one of the founders of the new classical economics and in 2011 delivered the Institute of Economic Affairs’ annual Hayek lecture on the economic crisis facing the governments of the developed world.

Israel Kirzner and William Baumol could scoop top award

City AM also identify Israel Kirzner and William Baumol as possible winners:

The 84 year old Israel Kirzner is certainly a dark horse. A follower of the Austrian school of economics, Kirzner received his PhD from New York University in 1957, where he studied under the classical liberal icon Ludwig von Mises. Kirzner’s research on entrepreneurship has criticised neoclassical perfect competition models and how coordination in the market emerges from discoordiantion.

Baumol is recognised for a host of achievements in the discipline. In his 1968 paper “Entrepreneurship in Economic Theory” he said the firm without the entrepreneur is Hamlet without the prince. Furthermore, noted economist Tyler Cowen has tipped Baumol for the prize.

Updated

Schumpeterian growth theorist could win

Thomson Reuters has analysed academic citations to come up with a list of plausible winners.

They include US academics Philippe M. Aghion and Peter W. Howitt for their work on Schumpeterian growth theory (the idea that “creative destruction.” helps to drive economies forward.)

Another option is Stanford’s Mark S. Granovetter, an expert in economic sociology.

Another pair of front-runners, for their work studying entrepreneurism, are New York academics William J. Baumol and Israel M. Kirzner.

Updated

Could British duo win?

As usual, there’s a flurry of speculation over who might win this year’s award.

And two British economists - Sir Anthony Atkinson and Angus Deaton - are in the mix, for their work on inequality, consumption and wellbeing.

My colleague Phillip Inman explains:

They are mentioned as possible winners because inequality is the subject du jour following publication of Thomas Piketty’s hit book Capital earlier this year.

Atkinson, a senior research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford since 2005, has an inequality index named after him. His book Public Economics in an Age of Austerity, was published this year.

Deaton is known for his work on “health, wellbeing, and economic development”. He is the Dwight D Eisenhower professor of economics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Deaton’s best known paper of recent times is “Income, Health, and Well-Being around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2008. His most recent book, The Great Escape: health, wealth and the origins of inequality, was well-received when it was published last year.

Here’s Phillip’s list of runners and riders:

Updated

You’ll be able to watch the announcement by clicking the embedded video at the top of this live blog.

The announcement is due in a little under two hours -- there’s a handy clock ticking down on the NobelPrize.org website...

Here comes the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

Good morning. Before the complaints rush in, let’s clear something up. We’re not here to cover the “Nobel Prize for Economics”. That award doesn’t technically exist.

Instead, we’re about to discover who has won The 2014 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

It’s the most prestigious award in economics, which has been awarded every year since 1969 when the Swedish central bank stumped up the money.

This award has certainly recognised some big names in the past -- for example James Tobin (who proposed chucking sand in the wheels of the financial system with a transaction tax), or Sir John Hicks, the British economist who created the Keynesian IS/LM model of how economies work.

The prize can also spark a debate as to whether economics, with its conflicting Schools, rival theories and somewhat patchy track record in improving our lives, is really a proper science at all. Or just a dismal one?

This year’s winner will be announced shortly after noon BST, or 1pm in Stockholm, where the ceremony takes place.

The Economics award rounds off the annual Nobel prize process - following the five “official” awards (for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace).

The speculation this year is that the winner could be an economist with a track record in income inequality or corporate governance, two “hot topics” today.

Or it could go to experts in entrepreneurship, behavioural economics, or even financial crashes.

There was some amusement last year when the committee honoured Eugene Fama (whose work showed markets are efficient) and Robert Shiller (who proved that they’re not).

If they want to top that, they could split this year’s award between the austerity brigade in the German Bundesbank, and France’s rock star economist Thomas Piketty. But I suspect they won’t ...

Updated

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

CAPTCHA

*