Tirole, Jean Marcel, 1953–, French economist, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981. He was a professor of at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1984–91) and École Polytechnique (1994–96) and since 1992 has been scientific director at the Industrial Economy Institute, Toulouse School of Economics, Toulouse, France. His research has encompassed industrial organization, government regulation, organization theory, game theory, information economics, finance, and psychology. In 2014 he received the Nobel Prize for his analyses of markets dominated one or few large companies that provided guidance on how governments can successfully regulate cartels, mergers, and monopolies. This work, much of which was done with Jean-Jacques Laffont (1947–2004), created a theoretical framework and showed how it could be adapted to such industries as telecommunications and banking, taking into account different conditions in different industries and rejecting the idea that a single theoretical model might successfully describe all industries. It has influenced how government monopolies have been privatized and how the broadband industry has been regulated. Tirole has also studied so-called multisided markets, such as newspapers, where the publisher must sell to both advertisers and readers. He has written such standard textbooks as The Theory of Industrial Organization (1988), A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation (1993, with J.-J. Laffont),and The Theory of Corporate Finance (2006).
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