On October 12, 2020, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson“for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”. Their discoveries have benefited sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world.

Professor Paul R. Milgrom, renowned for his work on microeconomics and auction theory, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently a Special-Term Professor of Shenzhen Finance Institute(SFI), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and was formally appointed as Chairman of the Advisory Board of the SFI Energy Markets and Energy Finance Lab in September 2019. Paul Milgrom is also the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Economics at Stanford University and a Professor, by courtesy, in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and in the Department of Management Sciences and Engineering. He is a winner of the 2008 Nemmers Prize in Economics, the 2012 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge award, the 2017 CME-MSRI prize for Innovative Quantitative Applications, and the 2018 Carty Award for the Advancement of Science.

As the official press release depicts, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson have studied how auctions work and used their insights to design new auction formats for goods and services that are difficult to sell in a traditional way, such as radio frequencies. In 1994, the US authorities first used one of their auction formats to sell radio frequencies to telecom operators. In presenting the contributions of this pair of Nobel laureates, the Nobel jury mentioned that auction-related issues are ubiquitous in today's world, and that Milgrom and Wilson's auction theory may help us to better design resource allocation schemes and to better understand the world. Intriguingly, Robert B. Wilson has once been Milgrom’s thesis advisor at Stanford University. The fact that three of Wilson's students have garnered this extraordinary honor is hailed a true legend in the world of economics.

Lixin Ye, Professor and Director of the M.A. and Ph.D. programs at the School of Management and Economics, CUHK-Shenzhen, has been a Ph.D student under the two Nobel Laureates. He described the two professors as very rigorous in their scholarship and respected for their many significant contributions in both theory and practice. In addition, Professor Paul Milgrom distinguishes himself from most of the Nobel laureates by two characteristics: first, he has made remarkable achievements in various academic fields, and second, his theoretical research is also highly application-oriented.