It was the middle of the night on October 12 when the Nobel Prize Committee called Robert Wilson (MBA 1961/DBA 1963) with good news: He and fellow Stanford professor Paul Milgrom had won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics for their improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats. Milgrom had his phone in Do Not Disturb mode. Wilson, who lives on the same street in Palo Alto, walked over to wake him up, a moment that was shared around the world on Twitter.

The pair’s work has had far-reaching practical applications for complex situations; for example, governments around the world now rely on one of their auction formats to allocate radio frequencies to telecom operators, reports the New York Times.

On the day the prize was announced, HBS Dean Nitin Nohria shared a tribute to Wilson with the HBS community written by Wilson’s former mentor, HBS professor Howard Raiffa. “I think we prepared him with an agenda for future research topics and a feeling of excitement for a burgeoning new field,” Raiffa wrote in 2002 on the occasion of Wilson’s 65th birthday. “I’ve had a lot of doctoral students in my long academic career and Bob Wilson remains the brightest of the bright and the nicest of the nice.”

After rousing Milgrom, Wilson called into the prize committee’s press conference, the Times reported. Asked if he had ever bought something at auction, he at first answered in the negative. But then he changed his answer. “My wife points out to me—we bought ski boots on eBay,” he said. “I guess that was an auction.”

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