Robert Wilson

Robert Butler "Bob" Wilson, Jr. (born May 16, 1937) is an American economist and the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at Stanford University. He is known for his contributions to management science and business economics. His doctoral thesis introduced sequential quadratic programming, which became a leading iterative method for nonlinear programming. With other mathematical economists at the Stanford Business School, he helped to reformulate the economics of industrial organization and organization theory using non-cooperative game theory. His research on nonlinear pricing has influenced policies for large firms, particularly in the energy industry, especially electricity.

Academic career
Wilson was born on May 16, 1937 in Nebraska. He graduated from a high school in Nebraska and earned a full ride scholarship to Harvard University. He received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1959. He then completed his M.B.A. in 1961 and his D.B.A. in 1963 from the Harvard Business School. He worked at the University of California, Los Angeles for a very brief time and then joined the faculty at Stanford University. He has been on the faculty of the Stanford Business School since 1964. He was also an affiliated faculty member of Harvard Law School from 1993 to 2001.

Research
Wilson is known for research and teaching on market design, pricing, negotiation, and related topics concerning industrial organization and information economics. He is an expert on game theory and its applications. He has been a major contributor to auction designs and competitive bidding strategies in the oil, communication, and power industries, and to the design of innovative pricing schemes. His work on pricing of priority service for electric power has been implemented in the utility industry.

Wilson's paper “The Theory of the Syndicates,” which was published in Econometrica in 1968 influenced a whole generation of students from economics, finance, and accounting. The paper poses a fundamental question: Under what conditions does the expected utility representation describe the behavior of a group of individuals who choose lotteries and share risk in a Pareto-optimal way?

He has published about a hundred articles in professional journals and books since completing his education. He has been an associate editor of several journals, and delivered several public lectures.

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