As the world was busy debating the significance of President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business had a winner of its own to celebrate. Oliver Williamson, professor emeritus of business, economics and law at the Haas School, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics.
Williamson shares the prize with Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University at Bloomington, who is the first woman ever to receive the prize. Both Williamson and Ostrom won for their analyses of economic governance.
“It’s undeserved I suppose,” Williamson told a crowd of more than 300 students, faculty and staff assembled last week to celebrate his honor. “I would describe myself as a conscientious teacher who had a lot of students who were tolerant and went on to do good work,” he continued.
Haas Dean Richard Lyons disagreed, saying that he “could not do justice” to the scope and influence Williamson’s work has had on the field of economics. That work involves mapping out a multi-disciplinary field to study how different institutions are best suited for conducting different types of economic transactions. He is credited with co-founding “New Institutional Economics,” which emphasizes the importance of both formal and informal institutions on transaction costs.
Williamson is the Haas School’s second Nobel Prize Laureate. In 1994, the late John Harsanyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in game theory.
To learn more about Williamson’s work, click here.
