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.

Roth, 60, is a professor at Harvard University in Boston. Shapley, 89, is a professor emeritus at University of California Los Angeles.

"This year's prize concerns a central economic problem: how to match different agents as well as possible," the academy said.

Shapley made early theoretical inroads into the subject, using game theory to analyze different matching methods in the 1950s and `60s. Together with U.S. 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.

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