US academics Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson won the Nobel economics prize today for their work in economic governance.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the 10 million Swedish crown (€950,000) prize recognised Ostrom for showing how common property can be managed by user associations and Williamson for a theory on corporate conflict resolution.
"Over the last three decades, these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention," the committee said in its statement.
The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968. It is not part of the original group of awards set out in Nobel's 1895 will.
Last week, Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller won the literature prize and on Friday, US president Barack Obama was named this year’s winner of the peace prize.
American scientists Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.
The physics prize was split between Charles Kao, who helped develop fiberoptic cable, and Americans Willard Boyle and George Smith who invented the “eye” in digital cameras.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz of the US and Ada Yonath of Israel shared the chemistry prize for their atom-by-atom description of ribosomes.