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ASU's Elinor Ostrom wins Nobel Prize

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Arizona State University’s research professor Elinor Ostrom won this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, making her the school’s third faculty member to win a Nobel Prize since 2001.

Ostrom, who shares the prize with Oliver E. Williamson of the University of California at Berkeley, holds research positions at both ASU and Indiana University. She was awarded the prize “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,

“This is a wonderful honor for Elinor, for ASU and for the State of Arizona,” said ASU President Michael M. Crow. “It is another example of how ASU faculty are working to solve real world problems, and how that work is receiving national and international recognition.”

Ostrom is best known for her study of institutions and how individuals interact in repetitive, structured situations.

At ASU, she is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, which was established as part of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2008. The center is focused on empirical and theoretical analyses of institutions and it uses things like laboratory research, field work and mathematics to guide policy-and decision-making toward sustainable development.

“Elinor Ostrom is not only a brilliant and innovative scientist who, by combining in an original way approaches in economics, anthropology, political science and decision-making has opened up many new perspectives in the study of institutions and decision-making,” said Sander van der Leeuw, director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU.

At Indiana University, Ostrom is part of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which developed a framework to provide a common structure for research on both urban and environmental policy issues throughout the years.

“Through her workshop in Indiana, and more recently also the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University, she has built a worldwide community of scholars in many different countries who apply her insights to the management of such common-pool resources as forests, water and the like,” Leeuw said.

The California native received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in political science from University of California, Los Angeles. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.