US scholars Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley win Nobel economics award

US scholars Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on the functioning of markets and how to best match supply and demand.

The work helps match organ donors with patients, students with universities, or internet search engines with advertisers.

Roth, 60, is a professor at Harvard University. Shapley, 89, is a professor emeritus at University of California Los Angeles.

"This year's prize concerns a central economic problem: how to match different agents as well as possible," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Shapley made early theoretical inroads into the subject, using game theory to analyse different matching methods in the 1950s and '60s. Together with US economist David Gale, he developed a mathematical formula for how 10 men and 10 women could be coupled in a way that none would benefit from trading partners.

While that may have led to little impact on marriages and divorces, their algorithm has been used to understand better a variety of different markets.