RECOGNIZING ECONOMISTS. This year's Nobel Memorial Prize winners are Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling, for their work on coordination. Props to my chairman, who was suggesting Professor Aumann as a possibility. Years ago, he had received intelligence that the committee had been considering a four-way award to Nash, Aumann, Selten, and Harsanyi (note the acronym) but there's apparently a tradition of recognizing no more than three people.

Kieran at Crooked Timber makes this observation.

From an outsider’s perspective, and speculating a bit on the politics of it all, the result seems like an interestingly balanced way to mark the rise of game theory in economics. While Schelling’s work is analytically acute (and the man himself is famously sharp in discussion), it is not presented in a technical mode. You can sit down and read the essays. Aumann, on the other hand, represents a much more mathematized wing of the field, proving theorems and developing new conceptual tools with precise formal properties. So, for instance, while Schelling can write essays like “Strategic Relationships in Dying” and “The Mind as a Consuming Organ”, Aumann’s papers have titles like “The Bargaining Set for Cooperative Games” and “Subjectivity and Correlation in Randomized Strategies.”

Yes, but Aumann also worked on a rather strange mishna involving the division of property. The title is "A Game Theoretic Analysis of ... Talmud ..." (it's in one of my stacks of stuff but I'm not sure where.) That's in addition to his pioneering work modeling an economy with a continuum of agents, such that each agent, whether producer or consumer, is truly infinitesimal and unable to affect the price. Price-taking is a convenient assumption, but modeling it in a meaningful way is not easy. Tyler at Marginal Revolution studied with Professor Schelling and has numerous posts. Just scroll. If memory serves, the "I'll meet you under the clock at noon" New York coordination equilibrium originated with Schelling. Hit the trackbacks to this post for more commentary.