Nobel Economics Prize goes to 2 Americans

The academy praised Ostrom for her innovative work.

“Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized,” the academy said. “Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories.”

One notable publication Ostrom wrote in 1990 examined both successful and unsuccessful ways of governing natural resources — forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands and irrigation system — that are used by individuals.

Williamson previously was a consultant to the U.S. Federal Trade commission from 1978-1980 and special economic assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at the U.S. Department of Justice in 1966-1967.

The economics prize was the last Nobel award to be announced this year. It's not one of the original Nobel Prizes, but was created by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel's memory.

Nobel Prize winners receive 10 million Swedish kronor (US$1.4 million), a gold medal and diploma from the Swedish king on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

The choice of Obama was the biggest surprise of this year's awards.

In other awards, American scientists Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. 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 K. Kao, who helped develop fiberoptic cable, and Americans Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith who invented the “eye” in digital cameras.

Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath of Israel shared the chemistry prize for their atom-by-atom description of ribosomes.

Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller won the literature prize for works that drew widely on her experiences — a mother who was deported to Siberia and spent five years in a communist gulag, and her own torment after refusing to become an informant for Romania's Securitate secret police.

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