Entrepreneurship and Incentives

About the speaker

Prof. James Mirrlees studied mathematics at the University of Edinburgh (M.A., 1957) and Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge (Ph.D., 1963). In 1963 he began teaching at the Cambridge as Assistant Lecturer and Lecturer. In 1968 he taught at the Oxford as Professor, and he moved back to the Cambridge in 1995. Currently he is Professor Emeritus at Cambridge, and Distinguished Professor-at-large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Master-Designate of the Morningside College of the CUHK.

During his time at Oxford he published path-breaking economic theories centered on economic incentives under asymmetric information, which have vast influences on economics, finance, management and political science. The methodology has since become the standard in economics. Mirrlees was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics together with Vickrey “for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.”