Three American academics won the Nobel Prize Wednesday for economics for their work on understanding how markets work when buyers and sellers have different information.
George Akerlof, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, Michael Spence of Stanford University and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, who served as chief economist for the World Bank after a stint with the Clinton Administration, will share the nearly $1 million prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Meanwhile, two Americans and a Japanese won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for devising innovative ways to build molecules without creating a mirror-image opposite.
William K. Knowles, a retired chemist from the Monsanto Co. of St. Louis, will share half the $943,000 prize with Ryoji Noyori of Japan's Nagoya University and K. Barry Shapless of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
