Ahead of the game: Roth and Shapley bag Nobel Prize for economics

The much coveted Nobel Prize for economics has been awarded to game theorists Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley for an "an outstanding example of economic engineering".

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the £750,000 prize to the US academics today for their research on how to match economic agents, such as students for schools, or even organ donors with patients. Roth is a professor at US university Harvard and Shapley teaches at the University of California in Los Angeles. The academics' work was described as a form of economic engineering by the committee assessing the candidates. The duo designed models for situations where traditional market mechanisms based on price do not work as well. "Even though these two researchers worked in...