Academic Apprenticeship
As a Prize Fellow of All Souls, Vickers was quite free to undertake postgraduate study if he wished, or to pursue a non-academic career. We saw how he started working with Shell.
But from October 1981, he enrolled into Oxford's two-year MPhil course in Economics. The programme consisted of compulsory work in microeconomics and macroeconomics, followed by three optional papers in special subjects, drawn from quite a long list. One of the three optional papers could be dropped if you decided to conduct original research, and write an MPhil thesis; and that is what Vickers chose to do. The MPhil thesis could then form the foundation of a doctoral thesis at Oxford. Candidates who did really well in the MPhil were permitted to progress to that, if they wished.Despite the difference in terminology, therefore, the MPhil cum DPhil programme was broadly similar to the comprehensives-plus-thesis package in a top economics department in the US. With Mirrlees, Sen and Stiglitz all teaching on the Oxford programme at about that time, its quality was outstanding. The modern MPhil syllabus had been shaped by Mirrlees soon after arriving in Oxford in 1968. Oxford's comparative advantage in those days lay in theoretical topics, and especially so in the areas of uncertainty, information, incentives, agency theory and welfare economics. Mirrlees, Sen and Stiglitz would all later be awarded Nobel Prizes. Vickers interacted with all these, and others; Stiglitz was a colleague of his, who returned periodically, in All Souls. Mirrlees and Sen worked at Nuffield College, barely six minutes' walk away from All Souls. But his principal tutor, his thesis adviser, was not in Oxford. That was Partha Dasgupta, who was then at LSE, and would later move to Cambridge. Dasgupta would point Vickers to powerful new research from scholars he knew well, like Maskin, Hart and Hammond. Dasgupta was interested in a vast range of topics, including welfare, agency, games, innovation and the dynamics of competition.
Vickers' MPhil thesis was completed by 1983. It formed the foundation of his DPhil, titled “Patent Races and Market Structure”, which was submitted successfully in 1985. This doctorate became the springboard of many later articles and a long programme of research. Three early papers (Harris and Vickers 1985a, b, 1987) were co-authored with Christopher Harris. Harris was a brilliant Oxford mathematics graduate from Corpus, who had gone on to study economics. He and Vickers were on the MPhil at the same time, and both came top of their class, with Harris ahead by a nose for the thesis prize.
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