October 21, 1996

Economist Ronald Grieson remembers Nobel Prize winner

Not many economists get the opportunity to call a former colleague and congratulate him on winning the Nobel Prize, but UCSC's Ronald Grieson got to do just that. Grieson worked with this year's winner in economics, William S. Vickrey, when they were both on the faculty at Columbia University. Grieson had a chance to speak briefly with Vickrey about the honor before Vickrey was found dead in his car just days after the announcement.

"We spoke just briefly--he was very busy," recalls Grieson. "He was thrilled and happy." Vickrey, who was 82, was on his way to an academic conference when he died, apparently of sudden cardiac death brought on by an irregular heartbeat. Vickrey and James A. Mirrlees, a professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, shared this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on informational asymmetries, situations in which decision makers have incomplete information.

"In truth, the Nobel in economics is given for a life's work," notes Grieson. "Asymmetric information was part of what Vickrey did, but his field, broadly defined, was public economics and public finance."

Grieson, who edited and contributed to a book of essays in honor of Vickrey before his retirement, says Vickrey was "not a modern careerist self-promoter. He would solve a problem in the 1950s or '60s that no one was particularly interested in at the time, have it published somewhere, and twenty years later, people would get interested in the problem and come to see it as important. Then they'd either start work on it and reach the same solution, or they'd reach an impasse and discover that he'd solved it twenty years ago, or they'd start working on it and then discover his work."

The book of essays, titled Public and Urban Economics: Essays in Honor of William S. Vickrey (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1976), contains "no sentimentality," says Grieson, adding that contributors include several Nobel Prize and other award recipients who were eager to honor Vickrey. "I haven't met anyone in economics smarter than he," says Grieson.

--Jennifer McNulty