Roger B. Myerson
Facts
© The Nobel Foundation Photo: U. Montan
Roger B. Myerson
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007
Born: 29 March 1951, Boston, MA, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Prize motivation: “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”
Prize share: 1/3
Life
Roger Myerson grew up in Boston, U.S.A. He attended Harvard University, where he completed his Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1976. It was during these studies Myerson became interested in game theory, a small field in the 1970s. Myerson took a position at Northwestern University, Illinois, where he conducted most of his Prize-awarded research. He is married with two children.
Work
In 1972, while studying at Harvard, Myerson took a course on game theory, which then became his main research subject. He conducted much of his Prize-awarded research at Northwestern University, Illinois, where he was a professor from 1976-2001. He was awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences in recognition of his contributions to mechanism design theory, which analyzes rules for coordinating economic agents efficiently when they have different information and difficulty trusting each other.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
