2009 Nobel Prize Economics awards

Early Monday morning, the winners for the Nobel Prize Economics 2009 were announced. Two Americans, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics for their work on how economic transactions operate outside markets in common spaces and within companies.

Prof. Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University received the award for her work on how common resources, such as forests, fish stocks, lakes or nature, are protected without recourse to laws or the destruction of the environment. She is the first woman to receive the Economics prize.

Prof. Oliver Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley, also studied economic governance, but within companies. Since much of economic life happens within organizations, he made a point of examining how decisions are made, rather than the usual study of economics, which is to treat organisations as single entities where internal decision-making is unimportant compared with the decision taken.

The economics prize is the only one of the six Nobel prizes not created in Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel’s 1896 will, and is officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.