- Paul? - Paul?
- It's Bob Wilson. - Yeah?
- You've won the Nobel-- - Hi, Bob.
- You've won the Nobel Prize.
- [Paul] I was asleep and the doorbell rang
at 2 in the morning, and I saw Bob's face.
and he was knocking at the door
and telling me that they were trying to call me,
and that we had won the Nobel Prize in economics.
- [Bob] He had turned off all of it,
both his landline and his cell phone.
So I just came over.
They asked me, the Nobel people asked
that would I please go over and knock on his door?
(both laughing)
- [Paul] So Bob was my dissertation advisor
and I got interested in auction theory,
because I wanted him to be my advisor.
I'd been advised by Bengt Holmstrom,
one of your previous students.
He said, "Well, the first thing you need to do is get Bob
to be your advisor."
So I picked on a topic that interested him.
- I'd like to mention he's the third of my students
to receive a Nobel Prize, very proud of that,
'cause I'm a teacher
and I take great pride in the successes of my students.
- People think about art galleries or eBay, for that matter,
they think about buying one thing or selling one thing,
and people competing to buy or sell that one thing.
These are really simple auctions,
but there are complicated auctions in the world too.
- [Bob] The theory of auctions
is really just a special application
of game theory, it's a special kind of game.
The key thing is that we were auctioning many items
at the same time.
The auction goes on until there are no new bids.
So it's an auction that's designed to be transparent,
to be slow and methodical.
We worked together to design
the first U.S. radio spectrum auction,
which is a novel design
that became the basis for many other designs,
and billions of dollars of transactions around the world,
and setting that up in a way that uses bidding
is something that nobody knew how to do before.
And we were able to innovate new economic methods,
market design methods that made that possible.
- Well, he's a phenomenon.
So he's very precise, very rigorous.
He thinks like a mathematician,
in a very rigorous, detailed kind of way.
I'm more of a speculative thinker.
He's very precise.
- For me, Bob and I think very differently.
He is a much more visual thinker.
He would draw graphs and pictures of things,
which I would go home and try to decipher
and try to figure out what he was talking about.
But it was inspiring,
but it was also stretching me in new directions.
- It's so great to, we're enthusiastic about what we do.
We like it.
And it's exciting-- - Yes, that's it.
- And I continue to be excited by new things
and that, it's a great life to be able to live this way.