Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/game-theorists-awarded-nobel-prize-in-economics Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Three American researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics Monday, honoring their developments in using game theory to examine financial market activity. One of the winners, Roger B. Myerson, provides an overview of their prize-winning work. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. RAY SUAREZ: This year's winners were awarded the prize for their research in showing how big marketplaces work. The theory they won for is known as mechanism design.And we turn to one of the winners to help us understand it. He's Roger Myerson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.Congratulations, Professor. ROGER MYERSON, Nobel Prize, Economics: Thank you. RAY SUAREZ: Well, let's start as basically as we can. What is mechanism design theory? ROGER MYERSON: You know, the term "mechanism," mechanism is just something that does things. But what we're doing, it's come to be used in economics as a term to mean, when we think of the market or the economy as a communication medium, for communicating information from people about what they can produce to or what they need from other people in order to allocate resources.So when we think about the economy as a way of using people's information and communicating it from people who have information to other people who have to make decisions, we've come to call that a mechanism. Actually, I think it was Leo Hurwicz's work that put that use of the word.But it's about communication; it's about communication and incentives to share information that other people need for decisions.