The Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three Americans yesterday, including Leonid Hurwicz, a 90-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, the oldest person ever to win a Nobel.
Hurwicz won for pioneering a field in the 1960s called mechanism design theory, which has had real-world applications as varied as helping insurance companies provide more effective coverage and designing the government’s auction of wireless airwaves.
Forty years after developing his ideas, the Russian-born Hurwicz earned his field’s most prestigious prize, sharing it with two 56-year-old economists who made significant advancements in the theory: Eric S. Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and Roger B. Myerson, a professor at the University of Chicago
