Leonid Hurwicz, a Russian-born economist, is one of three people to be awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics. He will share the $US 1.5 million prize with Americans Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson. The three developed an economic theory that shows when
Hurwicz, a 90-year-old Moscow-born American citizen, is the oldest-ever recipient of a Nobel Prize. He initiated the so-called “mechanism design theory”, which looks at the allocation of resources and whether government intervention is needed. It was developed further by two other scholars, Maskin of Princeton University and Myerson of the University of Chicago.