William Spencer Vickrey (21 June 1914 – 11 October 1996) was a Canadian-American professor of economics and Nobel Laureate.

The family moved to New York City in William's childhood, where his father was General Secretary of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, one of the nation's first humanitarian assistance organizations.

[5] In his seminal paper, Vickrey derived several auction equilibria, and provided an early revenue-equivalence result.

[6][7][8][9] Congestion pricing gives a signal to users to adjust their behavior or to investors to expand the service in order to remove the constraint.

[1] Alongside marginal cost pricing, Vickrey argued that the land value tax was necessary to efficiently fund city services.

[13] He was sharply critical of the Chicago school of economics and was vocal in opposing the political focus on achieving balanced budgets and fighting inflation, especially in times of high unemployment.

[15][16] His Columbia University economics department colleague C. Lowell Harriss accepted the posthumous prize on his behalf.

There are only three other cases where a Nobel Prize has been presented posthumously: Erik Axel Karlfeldt (Literature 1931), Dag Hammarskjöld (Peace 1961) and Ralph Steinman (Physiology or Medicine 2011).