William Vickrey, Canadian-American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1996)

William Spencer Vickrey was a Canadian-American professor of economics. He was a lifelong faculty member at Columbia University. A theorist who worked on public economics and mechanism design, Vickrey primarily discussed public policy problems. He originated the Vickrey auction, introduced the concept of congestion pricing in networks, formalized arguments for marginal cost pricing, and contributed to optimal income taxation. James Tobin described him as "an applied economist's theorist, as well as a theorist's applied economist."

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, is an award in the field of economic sciences administered by the Nobel Foundation, established in 1968 by Sveriges Riksbank to celebrate its 300th anniversary and in memory of Alfred Nobel.