His wife Patricia said: "Jim was brilliant and yet he was modest and lived simply.
"He gave generously of his time and knowledge as a teacher and supervisor in Oxford and Cambridge and as the Master of Morningside College.
"He was deeply loved and respected and will be sorely missed.
"His great life is over, but Jim will live on through his work and those he inspired."
Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at Cambridge, Fellow of St John’s and Honorary Fellow of Trinity, said: "James Mirrlees’ moral seriousness, allied to dazzling mathematical skills and an unerring eye for building minimalist economic models were reflected in some half-dozen articles that together constructed the theoretical foundations of public economics.
"To those of us who were privileged to observe his academic life at close quarters, it was also a source of amazement that he found it entirely right and proper to spend more time on his many students than on his own writings. He was unquestionably one of the most influential economists of the final quarter of the last century."
In 1996 Sir James won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Professor William Vickrey, of Columbia University, for their research on the economic theory of incentives when information is incomplete or asymmetric. Sir James was knighted in 1997.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge