Maurice Allais

A French economist who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on market equilibrium and efficiency. He also won a prestigious French award, the Gold Medal of the National Center for Scientific Research; developed methods that state-owned monopolies, common in France, could use to set prices; and discovered and resolved the Allais paradox, which explains people’s risk management behavior.

Allais was born in 1911 in Paris and has been a professor of economics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris for many years. His areas of economic research have included decision theory, monetary policy, growth theory, economic management, income and taxation, energy, transportation and mining. He also maintains serious interests in history and physics. Allais’s work has been influenced by Leon Walras, Irving Fisher, Vilfredo Pareto, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Maynard Keynes.