''Many of us had hoped for many years that he would win,'' Maskin told reporters in Stockholm in a conference call. ''He is 90 years old now, and we thought time was running out. It is a tremendous honor to have the opportunity to share the prize with him and with Roger Myerson.''

The academy said the researchers' theory let economists, governments and businesses ''distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not.''

Myerson told Sweden's TV4 network: ''It is a huge honor, I'm just overwhelmed to have my name on that list,''

He told The Associated Press that being named a Nobel winner was ''a great privilege'' and that he was inspired by the work of his fellow laureates.

''There were a lot of us working in this area in the late 1970s,'' Myerson said, categorizing his work as investigating ''How does information get used in society to allocate resources.''

In its citation, the academy said that the work done by Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson has let us ''distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not.'' This, it added, helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes and voting procedures.

Myerson explored the concept in detail in his work, ''Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict,'' and even built a mathematical model that analyzed elections.

Maskin, meanwhile, was cited for his work on determining what kinds of auctions, or selling procedures, could bring in the most revenue to sellers.

The prize is officially known as the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

The economics award is not one of the original Nobel Prizes. It was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Nobel's memory.

Americans have dominated the economics prize in recent years. The last non-American to win the prize was Canada's Robert A. Mundell in 1999.

Last year American Edmund S. Phelps won the prize for explaining the relationship between inflation and unemployment, work that has had a profound impact on macroeconomic policy.

Nobel Prize winners receive $1.5 million, a gold medal and a diploma from the Swedish king on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

The other prizes were announced last week, with the Nobel Prize in medicine going to Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that enables computers and digital music players to store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.

Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the chemistry prize for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding questions such as why the ozone layer is thinning.

Britain's Doris Lessing won the literature prize, and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change.

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Associated Press writers Malin Rising and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm contributed to this report.