Word: vickrey
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Martin Luther King Jr., 1964 By Robert Vickrey...
...Huntington Beach, Calif., for example, had never been patient before he went flying with his grandkids. "I forced it on myself so I don't become anxious or annoyed," says the computer-systems architect, 58. "I don't want to associate anything bad with the thrill of flying." Ron Vickrey, 69, a retired executive in Port Orange, Fla., believes his daughters were too young when he taught them to fly. By 16, when they were eligible to get a license, they had lost interest. With his granddaughters, he plans to wait and start them at 16. But he hasn...
...bought a used car knows that the seller typically has far more information than the buyer. That's why states have lemon laws. Such gaps in information lie at the heart of the work for which James Mirrlees of Britain's Cambridge University, and formerly Oxford, and William Vickrey of Columbia University shared this year's Nobel for Economics. By studying the "asymmetric information" that characterizes many markets, the two men, who have never met, demolished the classic economic assumption that all parties to a deal have equal knowledge...
...Vickrey, 82, designed a novel auction method in which bids are sealed and the winner pays what the second-highest bidder offered; a version of this is used by the U.S. Treasury to sell notes. Vickrey also urged railways and utilities to prevent congestion by charging peak rates at the busiest times of day, a practice that has now become routine...
...Canadian-born Vickrey, who died while driving to a conference three days after winning the prize, was known for his voracious curiosity and sometimes eccentric behavior. He often roller-skated from Manhattan's 125th Street train station to his classes on the Columbia campus and enjoyed sitting in on colleagues' lectures and asking pointed questions. He was keenly aware of the passage of time. "I have left undone many things that I ought to have done," he once wrote, "and can only hope that there is enough health left in me to make good some of the deficiency...