Nobel Prize Recipient. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for "his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm", sharing the coveted award with Elinor Ostrom. The Nobel committee said in its citation, "Professor Williamson provided a theory of why some economic transactions take place within firms and other similar transactions take place between firms, that is, in the marketplace." Oliver Williamson grew up in Superior, Wisconsin. He was the second of three children. His parents were both educators, and upon their marriage his mother retired and his father went on to work in the family real estate business and, for nine years, as the president of the Superior City Council. He graduated from Superior Central High School in 1950. After attending for two years Ripon College in Wisconsin, he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in management in 1955. Upon graduation, he accepted a position with the Central Intelligence Agency. He met his wife Dolores Celeni that same year, were married in 1957 and had five children. He earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1960. He received his PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1963. Professor Williamson began his teaching career as an assistant professor in the undergraduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1965, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania as an associate professor. During his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct comparative studies in industrial organization. In 1983, he joined the faculty at Yale University. In 1988, he returned to the University of California at Berkeley, where he became the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus of Business, Economics and Law and he created a PhD workshop, known today as the Williamson Seminar on Institutional Analysis. He retired from educating in 2004. During his career he wrote many books on economics. "Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications" and "The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting" are said to be among the most cited in social sciences.