On October 12 UC Berkeley added another Nobel Laureate to its roster of twenty previous winners. Haas School of Business emeritus professor Oliver Williamson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on how business firms can be a structure for conflict resolution. Williamson shared the prize with Elinor Ostrom, a political science professor at Indiana University. She is the first woman to win the prize in economics.

The Nobel Committee summarized Williamson’s work as follows, “According to Williamson’s theory, large private corporations exist primarily because they are efficient.  They are established because they make owners, workers, suppliers, and customers better off than they would be under alternative institutional arrangements. When corporations fail to deliver efficiency gains, their existence will be called in question,” they said, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, “Large corporations may of course abuse their power. They may for instance participate in undesirable political lobbying and exhibit anti-competitive behavior. However, according to Williamson’s analysis, it is advisable to regulate such behavior directly rather than through policies that limit the size of corporations.”
Williamson, 77, had been considered a likely recipient of the prize for several years. Richard Lyons, dean of the Haas School of Business, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the award was “long overdue.”
“[Williamson] had a profound effect on generations of scholars who came after him,” Lyons told the paper. The professor was awakened by a call from the Nobel Committee at 3:30 that morning. His son who was visiting initially answered the call and then passed the phone to his father, who was then told of the news, according to The New York Times. Later in the day, UC Berkeley and the Haas School of Business held a press conference in which Williamson talked to the press about his award, taking the stage to cheers of “Ollie, Ollie!” from his colleagues and students.

“I don’t recognize the fellow that Rich Lyons has been describing,” he said humbly. “Rich describes me as a good teacher. I would describe myself as a conscientious teacher who had a lot of good students that were tolerant.”

Others on campus, however, did recognize that ‘fellow’. “We congratulate Oliver on this well-deserved honor for his groundbreaking work in economics. He takes his place as the fifth Berkeley economics professor to win the Nobel Prize and further continues the remarkable contributions UC Berkeley has made to this field,” said chancellor Robert Birgeneau.

The campus has and continues to celebrate Williamson’s award in a variety of ways. On November 7, he was introduced at a Cal football game to a standing ovation. But perhaps the largest show of gratitude the campus can show Williamson is that legendary privilege which is awarded to all Nobel laureates on campus: their very own guaranteed parking place. “Oh, I plan to receive a copy of that parking permit and put it to good use,” he said.

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