Professor James A. Mirrlees, Nobel Laureate in Economics Sciences, will give two lectures at Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University on October 8 and 9, 2010, respectively. The lecture at Academia Sinica will be entitled “The Optimal Allocation of Risk”. All are welcome to attend.

Professor Mirrlees, together with Dr. William Vickrey, received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1996 “for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information”. Problems of “asymmetric information” deal with situations where different decision makers have different information. The most well-known aspect of “asymmetric information” tackled by Professor Mirrless was the problem of how a government should set income tax rates so as to optimize revenue without stifling the incentive to work, a theory known as “optimal income taxation”. As an advisor to the British Labor Party in the 1960s and 1970s, Mirrlees started his work on income taxation with the assumption that the government should take money from the rich and give it to the poor. To his surprise, however, his models and equations suggested that the top marginal tax rate for high-income earners should only be 20 percent. Mirrlees’ work on “asymmetrical information” became the standard in economics and was used by later economists in a variety of applications.

Professor Mirrlees is also known for his work on another incentive problem, “moral hazard”, and the co-creation, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Peter A. Diamond of the Diamond-Mirrlees Efficiency Theorem, developed in 1971.

Professor Mirrlees is currently Master of Morningside College at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He previously served as a Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge (1995-2004), where he is now Emeritus Professor. Other appointments also include Professor of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford University (1968-1995), Lecturer in Economics at the University of Cambridge (1963-1968), and Visiting Professor at MIT (1970, 1971, 1976, 1987 and 1997), Yale (1989) and the University of California at Berkeley (1986).

Professor Mirrlees has been a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences since 1999. He is also a fellow of numerous academies and learned societies, such as the Econometric Society in Britain, the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Economic Society, Academia Europaea, the American Economic Association, and the American Academy of Arts and rolex hulk Sciences. He served as the president of the Econometric Society between 1983 and 1984 and the Royal Economic Society between 1989 and 1992. Professor Mirrlees was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998.
Event: Academia Sinica Special Lecture by Professor Sir James A. Mirrlees
Title: The Optimal Allocation of Risk
Time:15:00 – 17:00
Date: Friday, October 8, 2010
Venue:1st Conference Room, 2F, Center of Academic Activities, Academia Sinica, No.128, Sec.2, Academia  
           Road, Nangang District, Taipei
Organizer: College of Social Sciences, National Taiwan University
                 Center for China Studies, National Taiwan University 
                 Academia Sinica
Speaker: Professor Sir James A. Mirrlees
               Master of Morningside College at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Emeritus Professor 
               of Political Economy, University of Cambridge
Moderator: Dr. Fan-Sen Wang, Vice-President, Academia Sinica
Online Registration: https://db1x.sinica.edu.tw/ASL/registerA.php?no=18