STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Americans George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Wednesday for advances in ways to analyse markets.

Akerlof, 61, of the University of California at Berkeley; Spence, 58, of Stanford University; and Stiglitz, 58, of Columbia University will share the $1.47-million Cdn award. The laureates laid the foundation in the 1970s for a general theory about how different players affect financial markets. Their contributions "form the core of modern information economics," judges said.

The award was the second prize announced Wednesday.

Two Americans and a Japanese scientist shared the Nobel chemistry prize in the morning for showing how to better control chemical reactions, leading to medicines including a treatment for Parkinson's disease.

William S. Knowles, 84, of St. Louis, Missouri, and Ryoji Noyori, 63, of Nagoya University in Japan shared half the award. K. Barry Sharpless, 60, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, won the other half.

The prestigious prizes in physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, and were first awarded in 1901.

The economics prize was established separately in 1968 by the Swedish central bank, but it is grouped with the other awards.

The physics winner was announced on Tuesday, following Monday's awarding of the prize in medicine. The literature prize will be announced Thursday and the peace prize on Friday in Oslo.

The prizes are always presented to the winners on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the prizes, all living laureates have been invited to the ceremonies this year, with some 150 expected in Stockholm and 30 in Oslo.

Last year's economics prize was won by Americans James J. Heckman and Daniel L. McFadden for their work in developing theories to help analyse labour data and how people make work and travel decisions.