Jean Tirole

Jean Tirole (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ tiʁɔl]; born 9 August 1953) is a French economist who is currently a professor of economics at Toulouse 1 Capitole University. He focuses on industrial organization and game theory. In particular, he focuses on the regulation of economic activity in a way that does not hinder innovation while maintaining fair rules. Tirole's work is largely theoretical and explored in mathematical models, not empirical research.

In 2014, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of market power and regulation.

Tirole received engineering degrees from the École Polytechnique in 1976, and from the École nationale des ponts et chaussées in 1978.

He was appointed a member of the elite Corps of Bridges, Waters and Forests, later completing graduate studies at Université Paris Dauphine; he received a DEA degree in 1976, and a Doctorat de troisième cycle in decision mathematics in 1978. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, writing a thesis titled Essays in economic theory under the supervision of Eric Maskin.

He started thinking about studying economics when he was 21 years old, which he found both “very rigorous”, but at the same time “still a social science”. He said he found “a lot of that human aspect” in economics, which he found important.

Tirole is chairman of the board of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Foundation at the Toulouse School of Economics, and scientific director of the Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI) at Toulouse 1 University Capitole. After receiving his doctorate from MIT in 1981, he worked as a researcher at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées until 1984. From 1984–1991, he was a professor of economics at MIT. His work by 1988 helped to define modern industrial organization theory by organising and synthesising the main results of the game-theory revolution vis-à-vis understanding of non-competitive markets.

From 1994 to 1996 he was a professor of economics at the École Polytechnique. Tirole was involved with Jean-Jacques Laffont in the project of creating a new School of Economics in Toulouse. He is Engineer General of the Corps of Bridges, Waters and Forests, Chair of the Board of the Toulouse School of Economics, and a visiting professor at MIT, and has been a professor "cumulant" at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales since 1995.

He was president of the Econometric Society in 1998 and of the European Economic Association in 2001. Around this time, he was able to determine a way to calculate the optimal prices for the regulation of natural monopolies and wrote a number of articles about the regulation of capital markets—with a focus on the differential of control between decentralised lenders and the centralised control of bank management. Tirole has been a member of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques since 2011, the Conseil d'Analyse Économique since 2008 and the Conseil stratégique de la recherché since 2013. In the early 2010s, he showed that banks generally tend to take short-term risks and recommended a change in quantitative easing towards a more quality-based market stimulation policy.