Nobel economics prize to 3 Americans

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Oct. 15 (UPI) -- Three professors from the United States were named Monday in Sweden as the recipients of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota, Eric Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., and Roger Myerson of Northwestern University in Chicago were cited "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory."

Hurwicz, 90, is regents’ professor of economics emeritus at the University of Minnesota.

Maskin, 57, is principal at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Myerson, 56, works with the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern.

The three men will split the $1.5 million prize.

Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901, although the economics prize debuted in 1968.