In this pandemic year, Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson received their Nobel prize medals and diplomas in an abbreviated ceremony in Paul’s backyard on the morning of December 8. The discussion quickly turned to the sheer number of “firsts” associated with this Nobel prize in economics.

The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and invention of new auction formats.” As explained in the prize announcement,

The American Economic Association has named Paul Milgrom a Distinguished Fellow, which is the associations highest honor for lifetime achievement. According to the award citation, Milgrom “is the world’s leading auction designer, having helped design many of the auctions for radio spectrum conducted around the world in the last thirty years,

Auctionomics, working on behalf of the C-Band Alliance, has proposed a novel auction design called FUEL (“flexible use and efficient licensing”) to sell rights to use the C-band for 5g. The design, proposed in June 2019, is a combinatorial design in which bidders can bid for between 0-9 licenses in each of 406 different geographic areas  (“partial economic areas”) identified by the FCC.

On April 12, 2019, Paul delivered the Robert Rosenthal Memorial lecture at Boston University. A video of that lecture is available here.

Paul Milgrom today was welcomed as the new chair of the economics section of the National Academy of Sciences. The Academy was created by President Abraham Lincoln to advise the United States on scientific matters. At its annual meeting, which ended yesterday,

The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) has released a new article about Paul here, and Stanford’s GSB has another article here about Paul and his co-winners of the Carty Prize from the National Academy of Sciences.

OpenMarkets is the CME Group’s publication, and they have now published both an article and a video about Paul’s research. Both are entitled “Why Paul Milgrom is an Economist You Should Know.” The article is available at this link and the video is available here.

The National Academy of Sciences announced its annual awards today, and Paul Milgrom was a winner of its Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, as shown here. The award is given every two years to a scholar in any field represented in the Academy.

Paul has been awared the 2016-17 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the area of Excellence in Graduate Education. A key factor in this award is the success of Paul’s graduate students, several of whom wrote letters to support this award.

Paul’s op-ed about the recently completed US incentive auction appeared here in TheHill.

The FCC announced the official close of the Incentive Auction today. Paul had led the design team that created the rules for this auction. Auctionomics, of which Paul is chairman, supplied some of the software used in the auction.

Professor Robert Wilson (Paul’s PhD advisor) has been selected as the winner of the 8th BBVA Foundation “Frontiers of Knowledge” Award, in the category of Economics, Finance and Management. The award carries a monetary prize of €400,000. In the short version,

Paul delivered the 2016 Nancy L. Schwartz Memorial Lecture at Northwestern University today. The lecture, entitled “Prices and Auctions in Markets with Complex Constraints,” is viewable online here.

Douglass North, who died on November 23, 1995, was one of the great economists of modern times. Despite being a careful empirical research, Doug was impatient with what he considered to be the excessive reliance of many economists on formal mathematical models.