Jean Tirole, a French professor at the University of Toulouse, won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics. In announcing the winner of the honour, which is awarded by the Swedish central bank (the Riksbank), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explained that Tirole outperformed the competition thanks to its "analysis of market forces and regulation".
For the commission, Tirole, "more than anything else, has clarified how to understand and regulate industrial sectors with few, powerful dominant firms" and the respective "failures of market mechanisms", such as higher prices than what would be motivated by costs, or the survival of unproductive firms through mechanisms to block the entry of new and more productive firms, responding to how governments should discipline competition and regulate monopoly, or manage mergers and cartels of firms.
Born in Troyen in 1953, Tirole specializes in the industrial economy sector, but also in game theory and in the study of the banking and financial system. He is also an expert on the links between economics and psychology.
Bocconi explains who Jean Tirole is: video lesson
