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Robert Wilson，1937年生，美国人，他是斯坦福大学商学院经济组的微观经济学的奠基人，他目前是斯坦福大学商学院经济组的退休讲座教授（Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus）。他是哈佛大学本科、硕士，1963年他获得哈佛大学商学院博士。1964年至今一直在斯坦福大学商学院经济组任教，从助理教授一直升到讲座教授。2004年他退休。PAUL MILGROM是他的学生，DAVID KREPS是他的晚辈同事，并继任他的讲座教授（Adams Distinguished Professor of Management）。他们三位都是美国国家科学院院士。His research and teaching are on market design, pricing, negotiation, and related topics concerning industrial organization and information economics. He is an expert on game theory and its applications.

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他1981年当选为美国艺术和科学院院士。

1994年他当选为美国国家科学院院士。（KREPS1997年当选，MILGROM2006年当选）

1976年他当选为经济计量学会的会士，1989-94年当选为经济计量学会的理事会成员。1997担任经济计量学会的副主席，1998年担任经济计量学会候任主席，1999年担任经济计量学会主席。这使得他在斯坦福大学仅次于1956年担任经济计量学会主席的肯尼斯.阿罗，斯坦福大学经济系退休教授萨金特2005年担任了经济计量学会的主席。

2006年当选为美国经济学会杰出会士。

他的著作有：Nonlinear Pricing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-506885-8. Paperback edition 1997.
Dr. Wilson 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. His book on Nonlinear Pricing (Oxford Press, 1993) is an encyclopedic analysis of tariff design and related topics for public utilities, including power, communications, and transport; it won the 1995 Leo Melamed Prize, awarded biannually by the University of Chicago for “outstanding scholarship by a business professor.”His work on game theory includes wage bargaining and strikes, and in legal contexts, settlement negotiations. He has authored some of the basic studies of reputational effects in predatory pricing, price wars, and other competitive battles.

以下是斯坦福大学商学院对他的报道，从中可见，正是Robert Wilson，使得斯坦福大学商学院的微观经济学有着超过斯坦福大学经济系的学术地位。

Market Designers
Decades of research by Robert Wilson and his academic protégés have influenced markets for everything from electricity to advertising to higher education.

Wilson, the Adams Distinguished Prof- essor of Management, Emeritus, was one of the first people to apply the principles of game theory—the idea that how people interact in a market affects the outcome—to market design.

“Bob was very interested in practice,” said Chris Avery, PhD ’93 and professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov-ernment. “We were in this very high-powered program—who can prove the most theorems, take on the most mathematically challenging problems.” Yet Wilson said it was OK to think about real-world applications as well.

“What was so extraordinary about Bob as an advisor was that his students had worked on a wide range of different topics, all connected broadly to his area of expertise,” Avery said. A few of those topics:

• Wilson and former students Paul Milgrom, PhD ’79, and Peter Cramton, PhD ’84, have helped design spectrum auctions, government auctions of the public airwaves.
  
  Auctions are a particularly good area for economic theorists who want to gain a deeper understanding of markets and price setting, because participants tend to be well informed and have a lot at stake, said Cramton, professor of economics at the University of Maryland. He recently worked with regulators in the United Kingdom to design a spectrum auction there. “The distance between the state-of-the-art theory and the application is essentially zero.”
  Spectrum auctions are complicated because the value of different parts of the spectrum may vary depending on who is buying and what else they can get along with it.
  
  “It could be that an existing cell phone operator wants to deepen service and another only wants it to cover the whole country for national service,” said Milgrom, the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in Stanford’s Department of Economics. “It makes this much more complicated than the sale of a single item.” Along with Wilson, he advised the Federal Communications Commis- sion as a consultant to Pacific Bell in the early 1990s. Many of their suggestions were adopted wholesale by the FCC.

• The market for electricity is “the most complex thing you could imagine,” Wilson said. He and Cramton consult with system operators in the United States and abroad. “The idea is to design these markets that enable the buyers and sellers to express their preferences and then have reliable electricity at the lowest possible price,” Cramton said.
• Google, Yahoo, and other internet search engines use auctions to sell ads on their sites. The losers don’t leave empty-handed, as in a more traditional auction, but instead pay less for a less desirable placement for their ad. Michael Ostrovsky, assistant professor of economics at the GSB, who studied with one of Wilson’s students, Alvin Roth of Harvard University, PhD ’74, has researched these auctions and figured out how rational advertisers would bid in them. Understanding bidders’ behavior can help improve the design of these auctions, making them more efficient and lucrative. Ostrovsky now advises one of the search engines on ad auction design.
  
  “I think that’s something very much in line with the Bob Wilson tradition—the research has very direct practical implications,” he said.
• Education may seem far afield from auctions, but game theory can be used to assess the impact of college admissions programs. Wilson’s former student Avery has done research that may have played a role in some colleges’ decisions to change their early admissions policies. “We documented that colleges were favoring early applicants,” Avery said. Since students who didn’t have counselors helping them through the admissions process were less likely to apply early, they were at a disadvantage.

Wilson’s wide-ranging interests make students eager to work with him. When Milgrom entered the PhD Program, a fellow student told him he needed to land Wilson as an advisor, so Milgrom took a class from Wilson and wrote a term paper extending Wilson’s work on competitive bidding. It worked: “Bob was extremely excited by my paper,” said Milgrom, who now lives across the street from Wilson and sees him out walking his dogs. “He said, ‘Well, this is nearly a PhD thesis. All you have to do is write an introduction and a conclusion.’”

Once they were working with him, students found Wilson a dedicated advisor. “I would go to Bob thinking that I had just discovered something that had totally invalidated all my results and I would have to start over,” Avery recalled. “An hour later I’d come out, thinking, ‘Bob just saved my dissertation.’”

It was two of Wilson’s students who started Ostrovsky on his own research path. Ostrovsky took a class on market design with Roth and Milgrom, who was visiting at Harvard. “I knew that I liked economics, math, and game theory,” Ostrovsky said. “I was very excited by this combination. It’s interesting mathematically, it’s very rigorous, and at the same time it has these very obvious real-world applications. However, I didn’t want to just keep doing research on the same specific markets. I wanted to look at something that hasn’t been studied before.”

This combination of academic rigor and real-world application is at the heart of the Business School’s PhD Program, whose graduates’ influence extends to businesses around the globe. “We’re disseminating a view of the world and management education,” Singleton said. “We’re enhancing the training of future managers all over the world.”

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2002年wilson65岁生日庆典，他的学生悉数到场，图中站立的老者是他在哈佛的论文指导老师

Game theorist Bob Wilson has been a prolific producer of university professors, many of whom came to a 2002 conference held at Stanford in honor of his 65th birthday. Front row from left: Avraham Beja, ’67, University of Tel Aviv; Steinar Ekern, ’73, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration; Claude d'Aspremont, ’73, University of Louvain; Bob Wilson; Muhamet Yildiz, ’01, MIT. Middle row: Paul Milgrom, ’79, Stanford; Takao Kobayashi, ’78, University of Tokyo;Peter Cramton, ’84, University of Maryland; Sridhar Moorthy, ’83, University of Toronto; Jean-Pierre Ponssard, ’72, Ecole Polytechnique; Howard Raiffa, Wilson’s thesis advisor at Harvard; Peter Jennergren, ’71, Stockholm School of Economics. Back row: Marciano Siniscalchi, ’98, Northwestern; Joseph Sakovics, ’90, University of Edinburgh; David McAdams, ’01, MIT; Alvin Roth, ’74, Harvard; Christopher Avery, ’93, Harvard; Sushil Bikhchandani, ’86, UCLA; and Bengt Holmstrom, ’78, MIT.