American Profs Roth and Shapely Get Economics Nobel

US economists Alvin E Roth and Lloyd S Shapley have won the 2012 Nobel economics prize for their work on the functioning of markets and how best to match supply and demand, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has said.

"The prize is about economic engineering," Professor Per Krussel, head of the Nobel Committee said on Monday. "It's about how to practically design certain markets so that they work well."

The context is "to pair together two different parties, like physicians to hospitals or students to schools," Krussel said, noting that "traditional market mechanisms" were not expected to function well in such circumstances.

Bloomberg
Roth, Shapley Win Nobel Economics Prize for Matching Theory
Niklas Magnusson and Josiane Kremer

Born on Dec. 18, 1951, Roth earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York in 1971 and a master’s degree and doctorate from Stanford University in Stanford,California, in 1973 and 1974. All three degrees were in the field of operations research.

Born June 2, 1923, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Shapley earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1948 and his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1953. He worked for Rand Corporation as a research mathematician and taught at Princeton before joining the University of California, Los Angeles in 1981.