2 Americans win Nobel econ prize for match-making

"There are economic problems that can't be solved with normal market mechanisms," Gardenfors said. "With these matchings there is no money involved so the main thing is to follow what kind of preferences people have — who wants to be matched with whom — and find a good solution to that."

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was the last of the 2012 Nobel awards to be announced.

It's not technically a Nobel Prize, because unlike the five other awards it wasn't established in the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist also known for inventing dynamite.

The economics prize was created by the Swedish central bank in Nobel's memory in 1968, and has been handed out with the other prizes ever since.

Last year's economics prize went to U.S. economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims for describing the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and government policy.

The 2012 Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics chemistry and literature and the Nobel Peace Prize were announced last week. All awards will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

AP Economics Writer Paul Wiseman in Washington D.C., AP writers Jay Lindsay in Boston and Robert Jablon in Los Angeles, and AP photographer Reed Saxon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.