"The 2014 Nobel Laureate in economics is Jean Tirole"

From Marginal Revolution:

A theory prize! A rigor prize! I would say it is about principal-agent theory and the increasing mathematization of formal propositions as a way of understanding economics. He has been a leading figure in formalizing propositions in many distinct areas of microeconomics, most of all industrial organization but also finance and financial regulation and behavioral economics and even some public choice too. He is a broader economist than many of his fans realize.

Tirole is Frenchman, he teaches at Toulouse, and his key papers start in the 1980s. In industrial organization, you can think of him as extending the earlier work of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson with regard to opportunism and recontracting, but applying more sophisticated and more mathematical forms of game theory. Tirole also has been a central figure in procurement theory and optimal contracts when there is asymmetric information about costs. The idea of mechanism design runs throughout his papers in many different guises. Many of his papers show “it’s complicated,” rather than presenting easily summarizable, intuitive solutions which make for good blog posts. That is one reason why his ideas do not show up so often in blogs and the popular press, but they nonetheless have been extremely influential in the economics profession. He has shown a remarkable breadth and depth over the course of the last thirty or so years.

His possible pick had been heralded for some numbers of years now, this award should not be considered a surprise at all. You will note that the Swedes mention Jean-Jacques Laffont, who died a decade ago, and who co-authored many of the key papers in this area with Tirole. Such a mention is considered a nod in the direction of implying that Laffont, had he lived, would have shared in the prize....MUCH MORE