The winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2016 have been announced.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has named Oliver Hart of Harvard University and Bengt Holmström of Massachusetts Institute of Technology as winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Economics. The two were awarded the prize “for their contributions to contract theory.”
“This year’s laureates have developed contract theory, a comprehensive framework for analysing many diverse issues in contractual design, like performance-based pay for top executives, deductibles and co-pays in insurance, and the privatisation of public-sector activities,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
The Nobel Prize for Economics includes a payment of 8 million Swedish krona. This is roughly $931,000. The prize will be split evenly between Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström.
Oliver Hart was born in 1948 in London and obtained his Ph.D. in 1974 from Princeton University. Bengt Holmström was born in 1949 in Helsinki, Finland. He obtained his Ph.D from Stanford University in 1978.
The Nobel Prize for Economics wasn’t one of the five original prizes included in Alfred Nobel’s will. It was added in 1968 and was established by Sweden’s central bank to celebrate its 300th anniversary. The first of this prize was awarded a year later and it has been around since.
The winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics were announced last week. The prize was
split between three people for their work on “topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.” One half of the prize went to one person and the other half was split between the other two people.
