Two Americans won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences yesterday while Japanese, Swiss and American scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The two Americans won the award for their pioneering use of psychological and experimental economics in explaining decision-making and behavior on financial markets.
Daniel Kahneman, 68, a US and Israeli citizen based at Princeton University in New Jersey and Vernon Smith, 75, of George Mason University in Virginia will share the 10 million kronor (US$1 million) prize.
Their research has brought together the fields of experimental economics and cognitive psychology, paving the way for scientists to rely less on observation of actual economies in decision-making and more on controlled laboratory experiments.
Kahneman has integrated insights from psychology into economics, "especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation.
Also yesterday, Japanese, Swiss and American scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing techniques used to identify and analyze proteins, advances that revolutionized the hunt for new medicines.
The techniques are also proving useful for diagnosing some cancers.
American John Fenn, 85, of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and Koichi Tanaka, 43, of Shimadzu Corp in Kyoto, Japan, will share half of the 10 million kronor prize.
The other half of the prize goes to Kurt Wuethrich, 64, a Swiss scientist with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California.
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