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STOCKHOLM -- Americans Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley were awarded the Nobel economics prize on Monday for research that helps explain the market processes at work when doctors are assigned to hospitals, students to schools and human organs for transplant to recipients.
Roth, 60, is a professor at Harvard University in Boston. Shapley, 89, is a professor emeritus at University of California Los Angeles.
"This year's prize concerns a central economic problem: how to match different agents as well as possible," the academy said.
Shapley made early theoretical contributions to the field of study, and Roth took it further by applying it to the market for U.S. doctors.
"Even though these two researchers worked independently of one another, the combination of Shapley's basic theory and Roth's empirical investigations, experiments and practical design has generated a flourishing field of research and improved the performance of many markets," the academy said.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was the last of the 2012 Nobel awards to be announced.
It's not technically a Nobel Prize, because unlike the five other awards it wasn't established in the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist also known for inventing dynamite.
The economics prize was created by the Swedish central bank in Nobel's memory in 1968, and has been handed out with the other prizes ever since. Each award is worth 8 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million.
Last year's economics prize went to U.S. economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims for describing the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and government policy.
The 2012 Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics chemistry and literature and the Nobel Peace Prize were announced last week. All awards will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
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