Profile · Superior, Wisconsin
Oliver Eaton Williamson
2009 Nobel laureate in economics; born and raised in Superior; Superior Central class of 1950
$700,000
Oliver Eaton Williamson built transaction-cost economics into a field and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in economic sciences with Elinor Ostrom. He was born in Superior on September 27, 1932, grew up on the corner of North 23rd Street and Hammond Avenue, and graduated from Superior Central in 1950. Summers meant Lake Nebagamon. He was the second child of two teachers: Scott left the classroom after marrying Lucille and joined grandfather Oliver Dunn’s real-estate office, later serving nine years as president of the Superior City Council; Lucille had been a Minnesota high-school principal and was required to quit when she married. He called Superior the most democratic place he ever lived, a town where talent came in many forms and was respected in all. He was a good student and a mediocre athlete who played Friday-night poker, went to Saturday dances, and bowled and shot pool with friends. He thought he would be a lawyer until math pulled him toward engineering. His mother said M.I.T.; he went to Ripon on the combined plan, then General Electric, Stanford’s business school, and Carnegie Mellon, where seven later Nobels sat in the same small program. Markets and Hierarchies (1975) and The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (1985) asked why firms exist, why they stop growing, and why a contract is not just a price. As Special Economic Assistant in the Antitrust Division in 1966–67, the Schwinn case taught him that organization was not automatically a crime. He bought the family summer place at Lake Nebagamon in 1972 and worked there in the summers. He died in 2020. A plaque hangs in the Douglas County Government Center.