Source: Mme Tirole

Jean Tirole, a professor at Toulouse 1 Capitole University, has secured the SEK 8 million (?690,000) award, known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

He is one of the most influential economists of our time, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The award recognises his research on understanding and regulating industries that have a small number of powerful companies.

¡°Left unregulated, such markets often produce socially undesirable results ¨C prices higher than those motivated by costs, or unproductive firms that survive by blocking the entry of new and more productive ones,¡± said the academy in a press statement.

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¡°From the mid-1980s and onwards, Jean Tirole has breathed new life into research on such market failures.¡±

His research tackled central policy questions about how governments should deal with mergers and cartels, and how it should regulate monopolies, for example. He argued that the best competition policies should be adapted to each specific industry¡¯s conditions.

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His articles and books outlined a general framework for designing these policies and applied it to several industries.

Professor Tirole¡¯s prize has previously been predicted by David Pendlebury, a Thomson Reuters citation analyst who suggests potential winners based on their citation count.

holly.else@tesglobal.com