Robert B. Wilson

Robert Butler "Bob" Wilson, Jr. (born May 16, 1937) is an American economist and the Adam Distinguished Professor and Emeritus Professor of Operations Research at Stanford University. He focuses on operations research and business economics. The sequential quadratic programming he introduced in his doctoral thesis later evolved into the nonlinear programming iterative method. With the help of other mathematical economics experts at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he used non-cooperative game theory to reformulate the theory of industrial organization in economics. His research on nonlinear pricing has deeply influenced the policies of large enterprises, especially the power industry in the energy industry. In 2020, he and Paul Milgrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for "improving auction theory and inventing a new auction model."