Roger Myerson

Origins and early life

Roger Myerson was born on 29 March 1951 in Boston to a Jewish American family. He read applied mathematics at Harvard, taking his bachelor's degree summa cum laude and a master's in 1973, and finished a doctorate there in 1976 with a thesis titled A Theory of Cooperative Games.

Work and career

He then spent twenty-five years at Northwestern University's Kellogg School, where nearly all of the work that would be cited by the Nobel committee was done, before returning to the University of Chicago in 2001. The problem he took up is one that any government, regulator or auctioneer meets. The people whose behaviour you are trying to shape know things you do not — what a licence is really worth to them, what a job would really cost them — and they have every reason to misreport it.

Mechanism design asks the question backwards: rather than take the rules as given and predict what people will do, choose first the outcome you want, then design rules under which self-interested people, telling the truth because it pays them to, produce it. Myerson's revelation principle showed that this search can be confined to a small and tractable class of rules, which turned a vast problem into a solvable one, and his 1981 paper on optimal auction design applied it to the sale of a single object, becoming the foundation of modern auction theory and of the spectrum sales that followed.

He shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2019.