James Mirrlees

James Mirrlees was an economist from the United Kingdom. He was born on July 5, 1936, in Minnigaff, and passed away on August 29, 2018, in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. He was one of the founders of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and had the alias Sir James Alexander Mirrlees.

Mirrlees completed his education at several institutions, including the University of Edinburgh, Trinity College, Cambridge, Douglas Ewart High School, and the University of Cambridge. He worked in the academic disciplines of economics and political economics. Mirrlees was known for his fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.

Throughout his career, Mirrlees served as a doctoral advisor to several notable students, such as Barry Nalebuff, Jerry A. Hausman, and Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford, among others. He received the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in the field of economics.