2012诺贝尔奖压轴戏,博弈论再摘经济学奖

TWO Americans were awarded the Nobel economics prize yesterday for studies on the matchmaking taking place when doctors are coupled up with hospitals, students with schools and human organs with transplant recipients.
两名美国人因研究医生与医院、学生与学校和人体器官与被移植者之间的有效匹配，昨天被授予诺贝尔经济学奖。

The work of Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley has sparked a "flourishing field of research" and helped improve the performance of many markets, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
阿尔文・罗思和劳埃德・沙普利的工作鼓舞了“蓬勃发展的研究领域”，并帮助改善了许多市场上的表现，瑞典皇家科学院说。

Roth, 60, is a professor at Harvard University in Boston. Shapley, 89, is a professor emeritus at University of California Los Angeles.
现年60岁的罗斯是位于波士顿的哈佛大学的教授，而89岁的沙普利是美国加州大学洛杉矶分校的教授。

"This year's prize concerns a central economic problem: how to match different agents as well as possible," the academy said.
科学院说：“今年的诺奖关注的是经济学的一个中心问题：如何尽可能适当地匹配不同市场主体。”

Shapley made early theoretical inroads into the subject, using game theory to analyze different matching methods in the 1950s and 1960s. Together with US economist David Gale, he developed a mathematical formula for how 10 men and 10 women could be coupled in a way so that no one would benefit from trading partners. While that may have had little impact on marriages and divorces, the algorithm they developed has been used to better understand many different markets.
夏普利对这一主题提出了早期的理论，在20世纪50年代和60年代利用博弈论来分析不同的匹配方式。与美国经济学家大卫•盖尔一起，他开发了一个数学公式10个男人和10个女人如何配对才能保证没有人会受益于配对伙伴。虽然这可能有一点影响到结婚和离婚，他们开发的算法已经被用于更好地理解许多不同的市场。

In the 1990s, Roth applied it to the market for allocating US student doctors to hospitals. He developed a new algorithm that was adopted by the National Resident Matching Program, which helps match resident doctors with the right hospitals.
在20世纪90年代，罗斯把它应用到如何把美国医学生分配到医院。他开发了一种新的算法被全国驻地医师匹配程序所采用，这有助于把驻院医师分配到合适的医院。

"Even though these two researchers worked independently of one another, the combination of Shapley's basic theory and Roth's empirical investigations, experiments and practical design has generated a flourishing field of research and improved the performance of many markets," the academy said.
“尽管这两位研究人员彼此独立工作，但夏普利的基本理论和罗斯的实证调查、实验和实用的设计相结合，产生了一个蓬勃发展的研究领域，并改善了很多市场的功能，”皇家研究院说。

The official prize citation said the two were awarded for "the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."
两人的正式获奖词说的是表彰其“稳定匹配理论和市场设计实践”。