Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson share Nobel Prize for Economics 2009

Elinor Ostrom (born 1933) is the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, and Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University Bloomington. She is also the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. Considered an expert on collective action, trust, and the commons, her institutional approach to public policy. 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

Oliver Eaton Williamson is a prominent author in the area of transaction cost economics. 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. 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."