The 2013 Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller.
It was awarded for their “empirical analysis of asset prices”, according to the awarding committee, the BBC reports.
The committee said the trio’s separate pieces of work had “laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices”.
The prize is worth 8m Swedish krona ($1.2m), which will be shared equally among the three winners.
Eugene Fama from the University of Chicago was praised for demonstrating that share prices are extremely difficult to predict in the short run, with new information quickly incorporated into prices.
The committee said Mr Fama’s findings had had “a profound impact” on subsequent research, and also changed market practice.
Lars Peter Hansen, also from the University of Chicago, was awarded the prize for his development of a statistical method that was able to test theories on asset pricing.
Robert Shiller, from Yale University, was included for his 1980s discovery that stock prices fluctuate much more than corporate dividends.
The Nobel committees have now announced all six of their annual awards for 2013.
The economics award was added to the existing Nobel award in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank as a memorial to Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.
Mr Nobel created the other five prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and peace in 1895.
