Lloyd Stowell Shapley, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, died

Lloyd Stowell Shapley, an American mathematician and Nobel Prize-winning economist, died on 12 March 2016. He was 92.

Shapley, who contributed to the fields of mathematical economics and especially game theory, won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2012.

About Lloyd Stowell Shapley

• He made fundamental contributions to economic theory and game theory.

• His work is central to the modern understanding of competitive behavior and its game theoretic underpinnings.

• In 1967, he, along with Bondareva, proposed the Bondareva-Shapley theorem. This work introduced the notion of “balanced,” a key notion to this day for understanding when games have nonempty cores.

• His interest areas include Non-cooperative market models, political games, cost allocation and organization theory.

• He, along with Alvin Roth, won the Nobel Prize for his work on the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.

• The theory offers solution to a key economic problem - How to bring different players together in the best possible way?

• Alvin Roth used Shapley's theoretical results to explain how markets function in practice. Through empirical studies and lab experiments, Roth and his colleagues demonstrated that stability was critical to successful matching methods.

• Roth also developed systems for matching doctors with hospitals, school pupils with schools, and organ donors with patients.

• Apart from the Nobel, he won innumerable awards and honours that include John von Neumann Theory Prize and Golden Goose Award in 1981 and 2013 respectively.

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