Michael Spence is Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a partner in Oak Hill Capital Partners and Oak Hill Venture Partners.
He served as Dean of the Stanford Business School from 1990 to 1999. As Dean, he oversaw the finances, organization, and educational policies of the school. Spence earned his undergraduate degree in Philosophy at Princeton (summa cum laude) and was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship. He was awarded a B.S.-M.A. from Oxford and earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard.
He taught at Stanford as an Associate Professor of Economics, then he served as Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard. In 1983 he was named Chairman of the Economics Department and George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration. Spence was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for excellence in teaching and the John Bates Clark medal for a “significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge”.
In 2001 he won, together with Akerlof and Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize “for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information”.