Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2020

  • American economists, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson were awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, 2020.
WHY FOR?
  • They were awarded for their work on commercial auctions.
  • Milgrom and Wilson improved the auction theory and invented new auction formats for auctioning off many interrelated objects simultaneously, on behalf of a seller motivated by broad societal benefit rather than maximal revenue.
  • Robert Wilson developed the theory for auctions of objects with a common value – a value which is uncertain beforehand but, in the end, is the same for everyone.
  • Paul Milgrom formulated a more general theory of auctions that not only allows common values, but also private values that vary from bidder to bidder.
  • Their work will help in auctioning goods and services, such as radio frequencies, which are difficult to sell in traditional ways.
MEMORIAL IN ECONOMICS 
  • The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.
  • It is not one of the original Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895.
  • However, it is generally regarded and often referred to as the Nobel award for Economics.
  • The prize was established in 1968 by a donation from Sweden's central bank Sveriges Riksbank to the Nobel Foundation to commemorate the bank's 300th anniversary.
  • Laureates in the Memorial Prize in Economics are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
  • It was first awarded in 1969 to Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen and Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch "for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes".
INDIANS IN ECONOMICS

  • Amartya Sen was the winner of the 1998 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences. 
  • He was rewarded “for his contributions to welfare economics”.
  • The Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer in 2019. 
  • The trio received the award for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”

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