Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson of the US won the 2009 Nobel Economics Prize yesterday for their work on the organization of cooperation in economic governance, the Nobel jury said.
Ostrom is the first woman to win the economics prize, which has been awarded since 1969.
“The research of Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson demonstrates that economic analysis can shed light on most forms of social organization,” the jury said.
Ostrom won half of the US$1.42 million prize “for her analysis of economic governance,” especially relating to the management of common property or property under common control.
Her work challenges the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should either be regulated by central authorities or privatized, the jury said.
A professor at Indiana University whose name has circulated as a possible winner in recent years, Ostrom told Swedish television her first reaction was “great surprise and appreciation,” and said she was “in shock” over being the first woman to clinch the honor.
She conducted numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins and concluded that the outcomes were “more often than not better than predicted by standard theories,” the jury said.
Williamson was honored with the other half “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm.”
He has argued that hierarchical organizations such as firms represent alternative governance structures, which differ in their approaches to resolving conflicts of interest.
“A key prediction of Williamson’s theory, which has also been supported empirically, is ... that the propensity of economic agents to conduct their transactions inside the boundaries of a firm increases along with the relationship-specific features of their assets,” the jury said.
The economics prize is the only one of the six Nobel prizes not created in industrialist Alfred Nobel’s 1896 will; it was created much later to celebrate the 1968 tercentenary of the Swedish central bank and was first awarded in 1969.
Last year the honor went to US economist Paul Krugman, a prolific New York Times columnist and fierce critic of Washington’s economic policies, for his “analysis of trade patterns.”
The economics prize wraps up this year’s Nobel season.
Americans have dominated the awards this year. For the five Nobel prizes announced last week — medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace — nine of the 11 laureates were US citizens.
The literature prize went to German writer Herta Mueller for her work inspired by her life under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship in Romania.
This year was a record year for women laureates, with five honored: Ostrom, Mueller; Australian-American Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider of the US for medicine; and Ada Yonath of Israel for chemistry.
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