3 Americans share Nobel

USA TODAY, October, 2007 by Barbara Hagenbaugh

WASHINGTON -- Three U.S. professors won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday for their work studying markets and the optimal way to bring together buyers and sellers, research that has everyday applications for everything from health insurance pricing to corporate pay incentives to auction formats.

Leonid Hurwicz, 90, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Eric Maskin, 56, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and Roger Myerson, 56, of the University of Chicago won for their work on "mechanism design theory," an offshoot of game theory.

They will split the approximately $1.6 million prize.

"The theory allows us to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not," the Royal...