Jean Tirole is scientific director of the Institut d'Economie Industrielle, University of Social Sciences, Toulouse.

He is also affiliated with CERAS, Paris and MIT, where he holds a visiting position. Before moving to Toulouse in 1991, he was professor of economics at MIT. In 1998, he was president of the Econometric Society, whose executive committee he has served on since 1993. He is president-elect of the European Economic Association.

Jean Tirole received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Free University in Brussels in 1989, the Yrjö Jahnsson prize of the European Economic Association in 1993, and the Public Utility Research Center Distinguished Service Award (University of Florida) in 1997. He is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993) and of the American Economic Association (1993). He has also been a Sloan Fellow (1985) and a Guggenheim Fellow (1988).

He has given several invited lectures, including the Hicks lecture (Oxford 1992), the Walras-Pareto lectures (Lausanne 1992), the Schumpeter lecture (European Economic Association 1993), the Pazner lecture (Tel Aviv 1993), the Walras-Bowley lecture (Econometric Society 1994), the Munich lectures (Munich 1996),the JMCB lecture (1999), the Wicksell lectures(1999), the Baffi lectures (2000) and is scheduled to give the Scribner lectures at Princeton (2002).

Jean Tirole has published over a hundred professional articles in economics and finance, as well as 6 books including The Theory of Industrial Organisation, Game Theory (with Drew Fudenberg), A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation (with Jean-Jacques Laffont), The Prudential Regulation of Banks (with Mathias Dewatripont), and Competition in Telecommunications (with Jean-Jacques Laffont). He is currently working on The Theory of Corporate Finance. His research covers industrial organisation, regulation, game theory, banking and finance, and macroeconomics. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1981, engineering degrees from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (1976) and from Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris (1978) and a ``Doctorat de 3ème cycle'' in decision mathematics from the University Paris IX (1978).