Oliver Williamson, 87, Dies; Nobel Laureate Studied Organizations

He went on to earn a master’s in business administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he discovered an appreciation for economics.

For a time he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, where he met Dolores Celini. They married in 1957 and had five children.

Professor Williamson obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1963, having written a prizewinning dissertation. He then joined the economics faculty at Berkeley. In 1965, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote “Markets and Hierarchies,” his signature book, in which he further developed his transaction cost theory — the work that would lead to his Nobel. (During his time at Penn he was also a special economics assistant in the antitrust division of the Justice Department, from 1966-67.)

He joined the Yale faculty in 1983, but within five years he was lured back to Berkeley by the promise of an opportunity to teach across disciplines. He taught economics and law there until he retired in 2004.

Soft-spoken but occasionally gruff, Professor Williamson enjoyed metal sculpting and summers with his family at a Wisconsin lake. He mentored countless doctoral students, many of whom who have made their own marks on the field. He and his wife, who died in 2012, regularly hosted dinners for his students at their home.

In addition to Tamara, he is survived by another daughter, Karen Indergand; his sons Scott, Oliver Jr. and Dean; and five grandchildren.

“He was very much on the humble end of the spectrum,” said Prof. Rich Lyons, who was the dean of the Haas School when Professor Williamson won the Nobel. “Two days after the Nobel Prize was announced, he sent me an email asking to see me. He was awarded half of the $1.4 million prize, and he said, ‘My wife and I would like to gift the prize money back to the school to endow a chair.’ He always had a sense of stewardship for something larger.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/economy/oliver-williamson-dead.html