Xavier Vives is a Spanish economist regarded as one of the main figures in the field of industrial organization and, more broadly, microeconomics.[2] He is currently Chaired Professor of Regulation, Competition and Public Policies, and academic director of the Public-Private Sector Research Center at IESE Business School in Barcelona.
Biography
A native of Barcelona, after obtaining his bachelor's degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), received a doctorate from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Gérard Debreu, and moved to the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor. In 1987 moved back to Spain and headed for ten years the Institute for Economic Analysis (CSIC) in the decade of the 1990s. In 2001 he moved to the business school INSEAD in Paris and in 2005 went back to Barcelona with a research professorship at ICREA-UPF (Pompeu Fabra University). He also taught at UAB and held visiting positions at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and New York University. He served as Director of the Industrial Organization Program of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in 1991–1997. He was editor of the International Journal of Industrial Organization in 1993–1997, editor-in-chief of the European Economic Review (1998–2002), of the Journal of the European Economic Association (2003–2008)[3] and editor of the Journal of Economic Theory in 2013-2020. Currently he is co-editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. Member of the Identification Committee of the European Research Council in 2014–2019. He has participated extensively in the policy debate in Europe with contributions to a substantial number of reports published by CEPR and CESifo networks as well as columns in Project Syndicate, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Spanish press (La Vanguardia, Expansión, El País). From 2011 to 2014 he was Special Advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Competition, J. Almunia.
Research contributions
Vives' research concentrates on microeconomics and ranges from industrial organization, information economics, and game theory to banking and finance.[4] His contributions started with seminal research in oligopoly theory and the study of price and quantity competition providing canonical models and results on price formation and competitiveness.[5][6][7] The research extended to the interaction between private information and strategic behavior with the early study of information sharing among firms.[8][9] This research has served as a basis for extensive theoretical and applied developments in industrial organization and international trade among other fields, as well as having implications for competition policy. A path breaking contribution was the pioneer application of lattice-theoretic methods to analyze games of strategic complementarities (or supermodular games), and in general complementarities, in economics.[10][11][12][13][14] His contribution opened the gates to numerous applications in a wide range of fields including macroeconomics and finance. Further work has studied incomplete information economies and the mechanisms of information aggregation and transmission in markets and learning by traders formalizing the ideas of Hayek. This work provides a bridge between the rational expectations and the herding literatures.[15][16][11][17][18][19][20] and has been applied to study the dynamics of asset prices.[11][21][22] Vives has contributed to the study of competition and regulation in banking and of financial stability with research that has policy implications for the financial crisis and European financial integration.[23][24][25][11][26][27]
More recently, he has examined the implications for competition, innovation and the macroeconomy of the rise of common ownership.[28][29]
^"Xavier Vives is one of the outstanding scholars of his generation in oligopoly and industrial organization theory"; "Xavier Vives has been one of the leading contributors to the modern theory of oligopoly", Quotations, respectively, by James W. Friedman and Eric Maskin from back cover of the book "Oligopoly pricing"
^Singh, Nirvikar; Vives, Xavier (1984). "Price and Quantity Competition in a Differentiated Duopoly". The RAND Journal of Economics. 15 (4): 546–554. doi:10.2307/2555525. JSTOR2555525.
^Vives, Xavier (1985). "On the efficiency of Bertrand and Cournot equilibria with product differentation". Journal of Economic Theory. 36: 166–175. doi:10.1016/0022-0531(85)90086-9.
^Thisse, Jacques-Francois; Vives, Xavier (1988). "On the Strategic Choice of Spatial Price Policy". The American Economic Review. 78 (1): 122–137. JSTOR1814702.
^Vives, Xavier (1984). "Duopoly information equilibrium: Cournot and bertrand". Journal of Economic Theory. 34: 71–94. doi:10.1016/0022-0531(84)90162-5.
^Vives, Xavier (2017). "Endogenous Public Information and Welfare in Market Games". The Review of Economic Studies. 84 (2): 935–963. doi:10.1093/res/rdw062.
