Professor Wilson shared this year's economics Nobel with Stanford colleague Paul Milgrom. He has also advised other winners of the award, notes Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen, and those collaborations have reshaped, take your pick, technical price theory or theoretical industrial economics. This year's award mentioned the use of Milgrom and Wilson's work on auctions to, oh, auction off bandwidth.
If you are a theorist, Stockholm is telling you to build up some practical applications — at the very least pull something out of your closet and sell it on eBay! A lot of people thought Roberts and maybe Kreps would be in on this Prize, but they are not. The selections themselves are clearly deserving and have been “in play” for many years in the Nobel discussions. But again, we see the committee drawing clear and distinct lines.Let's see whether that manifests itself in the job market papers and publications. The discipline has long been dominated by what might be doodling elegance and diddling rigor, something that probably left macroeconomics in particularly bad shape after stagflation and housing bubbles, and the failure of designers of California's electricity market to find something that turned up in experiments unnecessarily hurt people.
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