Winner says prize a victory for his field

In the world of University of Chicago economist Roger Myerson, when the phone rings at 5:30 in the morning in mid-October and the person on the other end of the line has a Swedish accent, that's usually a good thing.

It was indeed a very good thing for the 56-year-old Myerson, who learned early Monday he and fellow American economists Leonid Hurwicz and Eric S. Maskin had won the Nobel prize in economics.

But in a news conference at the University of Chicago, with a handful of Nobel laureates in the audience, Myerson said it wasn't the best thing.

"I've written some papers that made it into graduate reading lists, so that for a long time now there have been young economists coming into the profession who thought of things partly the way I wanted to think about them and the way I wanted to lay it out for them," he said. "That was the greatest prize of all."

This one is pretty good, too, he said to laughter.

Myerson said the prize gives more recognition to game theory -- an area of economics that did not get much attention when he decided to devote his life to it decades ago.

"I am very proud to be a part of that," he said.

In the early 1970s, when he was an undergraduate studying applied mathematics at Harvard, he and others came to understand the ramifications of what they were learning.

"We understand things better sometimes if we can put them into our mathematical models," he said. "That's what the big accomplishment was in the 1970s (and) I am very proud to be a part of that."

Still, the possibility that game theory could lead to a Nobel prize did not come for about 20 more years. In 1994, the prize was awarded to John Nash, who advanced game theory but is more widely known as the subject of the motion picture "A Perfect Mind."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Myers and his co-winners, beginning in 1960 with Hurwicz, studied how game theory can determine the best, most efficient way for allocating resources.

The three "laid the foundations of mechanism design theory," which plays a key role in contemporary economics and political science, the academy said. Their research helped explain how incentives and private information affect decision making in economic transactions and has been used to help corporations and even countries.

One area in which Myerson's his work has been particularly influential is spectrum auctions, in which telecommunication providers bid for parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

"He did some of the very first work on the design of auctions," said David Besanko, a professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University, a former student of Myerson.

"The work he did had a profound influence on the way in which governments think about auctions," he said.

And that kind of application of his work, said Myerson, is what is important.

"It's not just for ourselves within a little profession," he said. "We are in this business because we want to communicate with the general society."