American trio wins 2007 Nobel for economics

By Adam Cox

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Russian-born academic who escaped both the Communist revolution and the horrors of World War Two became the oldest person to win a Nobel Prize on Monday, garnering a joint award for a pioneering market theory.

Leonid Hurwicz, 90, and fellow Americans Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, won the 2007 Nobel in economics for laying the foundations of a theory that determines which market-based systems work best.

A bemused-sounding Hurwicz, who has taught at the University of Minnesota since 1951 after moving to the United States to escape World War Two, said he had not expected to win.

"On the contrary, I thought that my time perhaps had passed already," the American citizen said in a telephone interview.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the award honored the trio's work on "mechanism design theory", which assesses how well different institutions fare in allocating resources and the need for government intervention.

The theory was the brainchild of Hurwicz, who was born in Moscow the year of the Russian revolution. Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Myerson of the University of Chicago refined and tested his ideas.

Maskin was born in 1950 and Myerson in 1951, the same year Hurwicz joined the faculty of Minnesota, a school less-noted than "Ivy League" institutions for innovative research.

Maskin, who has an applied mathematics doctorate from Harvard, said he was relieved to find all three of them had won.