Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics for analyzing market power and regulation.
Tirole was recognized for analysis of the power of firms and the regulation of monopolies and oligopolies. His research developed tools for understanding industries in which a small number of firms can influence prices, investment or innovation.
A central difficulty in regulation is that governments often know less than the firms they regulate. Firms may have private information about costs, demand or technology. Tirole’s models showed how regulators can design rules that account for this information gap and for firms’ strategic responses.
The award was given to Tirole alone. He is associated with the Toulouse School of Economics and co-authored influential work with Jean-Jacques Laffont, but Laffont died in 2004 and was not a Nobel laureate.