29. Paul David Klemperer (1956–)

Paul Klemperer is a British economist born in 1956 who was an undergraduate at Cambridge University and did his graduate studies at Stanford University, where he obtained a PhD in 1986. He took up a post at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 1984, moving to Nuffield College in 1995 when he became the Edgeworth Professor of Economics in 1995. In his early years, his research focused on oligopoly theory, with his main contributions being on switching costs. From 1995, his interests moved on to auction theory and he became involved in applying his ideas to auction design, both as part of a team in the 2000 3G auction in the United Kingdom and later applying his own multi-product auction model to deal with the Bank of England’s auctions of loans to banks with different qualities of collateral assets in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.