Paul Milgrom wins The Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on Auctions

Columbia University Press author Paul Milgrom has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, with Robert Wilson, for his work on auctions.”This year’s Laureates, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, have studied how auctions work. They have also used their insights to design new auction formats for goods and services that are difficult to sell in a traditional way, such as radio frequencies. Their discoveries have benefitted sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world.”
 
In Discovering Prices, Paul Milgrom—the world’s most frequently cited academic expert on auction design—describes how auctions can be used to discover prices and guide efficient resource allocations, even when resources are diverse, constraints are critical, and market-clearing prices may not even exist. Economists have long understood that externalities and market power both necessitate market organization. In this book, Milgrom introduces complex constraints as another reason for market design. Both lively and technical, Milgrom roots his new theories in real-world examples (including the ambitious U.S. incentive auction of radio frequencies, whose design he led) and provides economists with crucial new tools for dealing with the world’s growing complex resource-allocation problems.

 

Roger Penrose wins the Nobel Prize for Physics

Princeton University Press author Roger Penrose, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on black holes. One half of the Prize was awarded to Penrose, with the other half shared by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Penrose was awarded the Prize, “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

The Academy announcement notes, “Roger Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity…ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.”

Penrose is one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists and the winner of the Albert Einstein Medal for his fundamental contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is the bestselling author, with Stephen Hawking, of The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton). With PUP, he is also the author of Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. He has contributed forewords to: The Best Writing on Mathematics 2013, edited by Mircea Pitici; Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics, by Albert Einstein and edited by John Stachel; and Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, edited by A. Zee. Penrose’s other books include Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe and The Road to Relativity: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (both Vintage). He is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Oxford and lives in Oxford, England.

 

Deaths of Despair Shortlisted for FT/McKinsey 2020 Business Book of the Year

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America. This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism’s excesses and make it work for everyone.
The FT describes the book as “[an] analysis of the future of capitalism, with acute relevance for the fate of President Donald Trump in this year’s elections”.

 

The World According to Physics by Jim Al Khalili shortlisted for 2020 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize

Jim Al-Khalili’s book The World According to Physics, has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Since 1988, the Royal Society has celebrated outstanding popular science writing and authors. Over the decades, the Prize has celebrated some notable winners including Bill Bryson and Stephen Hawking, and most recently Caroline Criado Perez for bringing together compelling data showing gender biases in our world.  To find out more about Jim’s book, follow the link below.