Paul Milgrom · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Economist who generalised auction theory and, with Robert Wilson, designed the simultaneous multiple round auction first used for US radio spectrum in 1994; Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2020
20 April 1948, Detroit, Michigan, United States
Detroit · Oak Park (Michigan) · Stanford · Evanston · New Haven
Paul Milgrom is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Economist who generalised auction theory and, with Robert Wilson, designed the simultaneous multiple round auction first used for US radio spectrum in 1994; Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2020
Origins and early life
Paul Robert Milgrom was born in Detroit on 20 April 1948, the second of four sons of Abraham Isaac Milgrom and Anne Lillian Finkelstein, and grew up in suburban Oak Park, finishing high school there in 1966. His parents were both children of Jewish immigrants, his father born in Canada to Polish-Jewish parents and his mother in Detroit to Ukrainian-Jewish parents, and as a boy he joined youth groups in the local Jewish community and had his bar mitzvah at Congregation Beth Yehudah in 1961.
He graduated in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1970 and worked as an actuary in San Francisco and Columbus, Ohio, before going to Stanford in 1975 for a business degree.
Work and career
A professor there persuaded him to take a doctorate instead, and his thesis, finished in 1978 under Robert Wilson, extended Wilson's auction theory; he then taught at Northwestern and Yale before returning to Stanford in 1987. With Robert Weber he published in 1982 a general theory of auctions showing that a seller can expect more revenue from formats in which bidders learn of one another's estimates while bidding. When Congress let the Federal Communications Commission auction radio-spectrum licences in 1993, he and Wilson proposed the simultaneous multiple round auction, with every licence on sale at once, first used in 1994.
Other countries copied the design, and through his company Auctionomics he later led the team behind the incentive auction of 2016 and 2017, which bought spectrum back from television broadcasters and resold it for mobile broadband. He is the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, where Wilson, his former adviser, is also his neighbour. The 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly to him and Robert Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”.
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Source: Wikipedia — Paul Milgrom / NobelPrize.org Economic Sciences 2020
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Economist who generalised auction theory and, with Robert Wilson, designed the simultaneous multiple round auction first used for US radio spectrum in 1994; Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2020
Source: Wikipedia — Paul Milgrom / NobelPrize.org Economic Sciences 2020
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