北京时间12日晚7点，诺贝尔奖评审委员会在瑞典首都斯德哥尔摩宣布，美国经济学家艾利诺.奥斯特若姆和奥利弗.E.威廉姆森获得2009年诺贝尔经济学奖。
Elinor Ostrom (born 1933) is an American political scientist. She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson, for "her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.She is the first woman to win the prize in this category. She is also the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, and Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University Bloomington.In addition, she is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University.
Ostrom is considered one of the leading scholars in the study of common pool resources. In particular, Ostrom's work emphasizes how humans and ecosystems interact to provide for long run sustainable resource yields. Forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems, among others, all exhibit the characteristics of common pool resources and Ostrom's work has highlighted how humans have created diverse institutional arrangements over natural resources for thousands of years that have prevented ecosystem collapse. Yet, Ostrom is quick to point out that, while successes are abundant, humans are also responsible for countless ecosystem collapses. Her current work emphasizes the multifaceted nature of human-ecosystem interaction and argues against any singular "panacea" attempt to solve individual social-ecological system problems.

Oliver Eaton Williamson (born September 27, 1932) is a prominent author in the area of transaction cost economics, a student of Ronald Coase, Herbert Simon and Richard Cyert.Williamson received his B.Sc . in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1955,M.B.A. from Stanford University in 1960, and his Ph.D fromCarnegie Mellon University in 1963.He has held professorships in business administration, economics, and law at theUniversity of California, Berkeley since 1988 and is currently the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus at theHaas School of Business.In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for "his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm sharing it with Elinor Ostrom.
His focus on the costs of transactions have led Williamson to distinguish between repeated case-by-case bargaining on the one hand and relationship-specific contracts on the other. For example, the repeated purchasing of coal from a spot market to meet the daily or weekly needs of an electric utility would represent case by case bargaining. But over time, the utility is likely to form ongoing relationships with a specific supplier, and the economics of the relationship-specific dealings will be importantly different, he has argued.
Other economists have tested Williamson's transaction-cost theories in empirical contexts. One important example is a paper by Paul L. Joskow,"Contract Duration and Relationship-Specific Investments: Empirical Evidence fromMarkets "in American Economic Review,March 1987. The incomplete contracts[/url] approach to the theory of the firm and corporate finance is partly based on the work of Williamson and Coase
Oliver Williamson is credited with the development of the term "Information Impactedness", which applies in situations where it is difficult to ascertain what the costs to information are. This condition exists

"mainly because of uncertainty and opportunism, though bounded rationality is involved as well. It exists when true underlying circumstances relevant to the transaction, or related set of transactions, are known to one or more parties but cannot be costlessly discerned by or displayed for others." Market and Hierarchies