Paul Milgrom is the Shirley and Leonard Ely professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Economics at Stanford University and professor, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a winner of the Nemmers Prize in Economics. Milgrom is best known for his contributions to the theory of auctions, for pioneering contributions to the practical design of multi-item auctions, and for his success as a bidding advisor. Milgrom’s book Putting Auction Theory to Work was published by Cambridge University Press and received high praise from both Nobel-winning economists and leading practitioners. His research has also advanced understanding in many other areas of economics, including incentive theory, industrial economics, economic history, economics of manufacturing, economics of organizations, and game theory. Milgrom’s most recent research focuses on issues of market design, including an emphasis on the ways that market participants express their preferences.
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Jean Marcel Tirole is a French professor of economics. He works on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and economics and psychology. Tirole is director of the Foundation Jean-Jacques Laffont - Toulouse School of Economics, and scientific director of the Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI) in Toulouse. After receiving his PhD from MIT in 1981, he worked as a researcher at l'École nationale des ponts et chaussées until 1984. From 1984-1991 he worked as a Professor of Economics at MIT. He was president of the Econometric Society in 1998 and of the European Economic Association in 2001. He is still affiliated with MIT, where he holds a visiting position.
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Robert Porter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University. He has conducted research on a variety of topics in industrial organization, including theoretical and empirical studies of collusion, price wars, and bidders' behavior in auctions. His research includes studies of the federal auctions of offshore oil and gas leases, and of procurement auctions for highway construction and for school milk. He has investigated firms' bidding strategies, the formation of bidding consortia and joint ventures, and statistical methods for detecting the presence of a bid rigging scheme. He is Co-Editor of American Economic Journal: Microeconomics and a co-editor of Volume 3 of the Handbook of Industrial Organization. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2009 Distinguished Fellow of the Industrial Organization Society.
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