astronomy

Xavier Vives

Xavier Vives is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Xavier Vives rather than just read about it. In short: Xavier Vives (Spanish: [ˈbiβes]; born 1955) is a Spanish economist regarded as one of the main figures in the field of industrial organization and, more broadly, microeconomics. He is currently Chaired Professor of Regulation, Competition and Public Policies, and academic director of the Public-Private Sector Research Center at IESE Business School in Barcelona.

Key takeaways

Xavier Vives belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Xavier Vives to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Xavier Vives from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Xavier Vives (Spanish: [ˈbiβes]; born 1955) is a Spanish economist regarded as one of the main figures in the field of industrial organization and, more broadly, microeconomics. He is currently Chaired Professor of Regulation, Competition and Public Policies, and academic director of the Public-Private Sector Research Center at IESE Business School in Barcelona.

Biography A native of Barcelona, after obtaining his bachelor's degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), received a doctorate from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Gérard Debreu, and moved to the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor. In 1987 moved back to Spain and headed for ten years the Institute for Economic Analysis (CSIC) in the decade of the 1990s. In 2001 he moved to the business school INSEAD in Paris and in 2005 went back to Barcelona with a research professorship at ICREA-UPF (Pompeu Fabra University). He also taught at UAB and held visiting positions at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and New York University. He served as director of the Industrial Organization Program of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in 1991–1997. He was editor of the International Journal of Industrial Organization in 1993–1997, editor-in-chief of the European Economic Review (1998–2002), of the Journal of the European Economic Association (2003–2008) and editor of the Journal of Economic Theory in 2013-2020. Currently he is co-editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. Member of the Identification Committee of the European Research Council in 2014–2019. He has participated extensively in the policy debate in Europe with contributions to a substantial number of reports published by CEPR and CESifo networks as well as columns in Project Syndicate, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Spanish press (La Vanguardia, Expansión, El País). From 2011 to 2014 he was Special Advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Competition, J. Almunia.

Research contributions Vives' research concentrates on microeconomics and ranges from industrial organization, information economics, and game theory to banking and finance. His contributions started with seminal research in oligopoly theory and the study of price and quantity competition providing canonical models and results on price formation and competitiveness. The research extended to the interaction between private information and strategic behavior with the early study of information sharing among firms. This research has served as a basis for extensive theoretical and applied developments in industrial organization and international trade among other fields, as well as having implications for competition policy. A path breaking contribution was the pioneer application of lattice-theoretic methods to analyze games of strategic complementarities (or supermodular games), and in general complementarities, in economics. His contribution opened the gates to numerous applications in a wide range of fields including macroeconomics and finance. Further work has studied incomplete information economies and the mechanisms of information aggregation and transmission in markets and learning by traders formalizing the ideas of Hayek. This work provides a bridge between the rational expectations and the herding literatures. and has been applied to study the dynamics of asset prices. Vives has contributed to the study of competition and regulation in banking and of financial stability with research that has policy implications for the financial crisis and European financial integration. More recently, he has examined the implications for competition, innovation and the macroeconomy of the rise of common ownership.

Books Oligopoly Pricing: Old Ideas and New Tools (MIT Press, 1999). Information and Learning in Markets: the Impact of Market Microstructure (Princeton University Press, 2008). Competition and Stability in Banking: the Role of Regulation and Competition Policy (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Awards and honors Vives is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 1992, of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2002, of the European Economic Association since 2004, of the Spanish Economic Association since 2010, of the Institute of Catalan Studies since 2011 and of the Academia Europaea since 2012. He has received several research prizes in Spain, among them the Premio Nacional de Investigación Pascual Madoz 2020, the Premio Rey Jaime I de Economía in 2013. In 2009 and 2018 he was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant, and in 2015 a Wim Duisenberg Fellowship from the European Central Bank. President of EARIE (European Association for Research in Industrial Economics) Archived 2017-11-10 at the Wayback Machine for the period 2016–2018 and current Vicepresident of the European Finance Association. Distinguished Fellow of the Luohan Academy since 2020.

References

External links Official website

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Xavier Vives

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Xavier Vives claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Xavier Vives before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Xavier Vives ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Xavier Vives

In research: Xavier Vives appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Xavier Vives in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Xavier Vives is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1955 births, Academic staff of the University of Navarra, Autonomous University of Barcelona alumni, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Xavier Vives outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Xavier Vives in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Xavier Vives means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Xavier Vives out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Xavier Vives in simple terms?

Why does Xavier Vives matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Xavier Vives?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Xavier Vives.