First woman wins Nobel Economics Prize

法新社 Pia Ohlin

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for research seen as highly topical amid efforts to tackle climate change and in the wake of the economic crisis.

Economist Oliver Williamson, another US national, shared the 10-million-kronor (1.42-million dollar, 980,000-euro) prize with Ostrom, whose name has circulated for years as a possible winner.

Ostrom said it was "a great thrill and a very big surprise" to win the Nobel.

"I think we've already entered a new era and we recognise that women have the capability of doing great scientific work. I think it's an honour to be the first woman but I won't be the last," she told reporters. Ostrom's reaction to her win

Ostrom describes herself as a political scientist instead of an economist and is a professor at Indiana University, where she researches the management of common property or property under common control, such as natural resources. List of previous winners.

Her work -- inspired by her mother's "Victory Garden" during World War II to feed Allied troops -- challenged the notion that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatised, the jury said.

"If we want to halt the degradation of our natural environment and prevent a repetition of the many collapses of natural-resource stocks experienced in the past, we should learn from the successes and failures of common-property regimes," it said.

She conducted numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, and concluded that the outcomes are "more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories," it added.

Ostrom told a news conference at the university: "I have been studying how local people as well as government officials have attempted to solve very difficult problems," such as deforestation and loss of fisheries.

"When individuals have this way of working together officially and can build trust and respect they may be able to solve problems."

Williamson, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, was honoured with the other half of the prize "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm."

He has studied the existence of large firms and argued that hierarchical organisations represent alternative governance structures which differ in their approaches to resolving conflicts of interest. Americans dominate Nobel prizes

"According to Williamson's theory, large private corporations exist primarily because they are efficient.... When corporations fail to deliver efficiency gains, their existence will be called in question," the jury said.

Landis Gabel, a senior economics and management professor at top French business school INSEAD who studied under Williamson in the 1970s, told AFP the choice of Williamson and Ostrom was "timely."

"Both the Nobel laureates this year have been working on areas that kicked off with the concept of failing markets," he said.

"In the one case (in Ostrom's work) the failure has to do with common resources and the other (Williamson's) with imperfections that have implications for the structure of business firms," he said.

Timothy Van Zandt, also an economics professor at INSEAD, told AFP that Williamson's ideas "have changed the way financial firms are run."

Gabel told AFP that Williamson's ideas differed from more traditional market theorists, some of whose ideas are considered to have been discredited by the recent financial and economic turmoil.

"To the extent that there might be a reaction of the Nobel committee to the recent problems in the world economy, that reaction would be favourable to Williamson," he said. "Because his work doesn't start with an assumption that everything's perfect (in markets), but quite the contrary."

Meanwhile the committee's decision to honour Ostrom "fits in very well with current issues that the world faces about how to deal with over-exploited fisheries, global warming and other environmental problems which ultimately come down to too many people using too much of the resources," Van Zandt said.

The Nobel Economics Prize

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New thinking on consumers gets Nobel speculation

Louise Nordstrom, Ap Business Writer – 10/11/09

STOCKHOLM – As the globe grapples with the problem of greenhouse gases and tries to restore the battered economy to health, research into the economics of climate change or the key to what truly makes consumers tick could be contenders for this year's Nobel prize in economics.

The last of the six Nobel prizes announced this year, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to be announced Monday is not among the original awards and was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel's memory.

If history is any guide, being American and male is no hindrance to winning. Since 1980, the prize has gone to American winners 23 times. No woman has won the prize since it was first awarded in 1969.

Though the prize committee most often chooses to reward older research that has stood the test of time, relatively new work on consumer thinking from Austrian Ernst Fehr, a behavioral economist of the University of Zurich, is running high in the speculation debate.

Matthew Rabin, a 45-year-old American at the University of California at Berkeley with similar interests, is also mentioned frequently.

Fehr's research backs up the adage that revenge is sweet. Fehr found that the part of the human brain associated with satisfaction was more active when people contemplated getting even.

An elaborate laboratory game was structured so that players would earn the most money if they trusted their partners and parted with their money. Players were offered the option of seeking revenge by fining double-crossers but were warned that doing so would cost them.

"In the end, what we have shown is that reward circuits in the brain are activated when people can punish the other person," Fehr said. "People don't gain something in economic terms -- they get something in psychological terms."

Rabin has studied the economics of immediate gratification, and the implications of people's self-control problems for consumer choice, marketing, incentive theory and addiction.

Other favorites include professors Martin Weitzman of Harvard University and Yale University's William Nordhaus, who have made contributions to the economics of climate change, mainly shedding light on how to use cost-benefit analysis to help shape policy decisions.

Micro-economist Bengt Holmstrom at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also among the favorites for his research into the design of contracts and how that can shape long-term incentives.

Anil Kashyap, professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, said that Holmstrom, along with Stanford University's Paul Milgrom -- known for his contributions to the theory of auctions -- have "done path-breaking work on those topics."

But, experts warn about speculating too much about contemporary research. Despite current events, the Nobel economics prize is rarely linked to recent findings and contemporary economic swings, said Hubert Fromlet, a professor in International Economics at the Jonkoping International Business School in Sweden.

"They absolutely don't, in any way, have to serve as guides," he said of lists trying to pick the winner.

Fromlet, whose own top choices include Robert Barro of Harvard, one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, and Paul Romer of Stanford, who studies economic growth, said economic prize laureates usually have put in decades of work so that their findings have had enough time to be tested.

"Economy isn't always an exact science," he said. "You want experience and that experience should be around 20 years, and so young researchers usually have to wait a while."

"You don't in the future want to have to admit that today's credible results don't last the long haul."

Paul Krugman, the Princeton University scholar, New York Times columnist and unabashed liberal, won the prize last year for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect international trade patterns.

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

Last week, 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 and on Friday, President Barack Obama was named this year's winner of the peace prize.

AP Economics Writer Jeannine Aversa in Washington contributed to this report.

On the Net:

http://www.nobelprize.org

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