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STOCKHOLM (CBS 5 / AP / BCN) ― Americans Oliver Williamson, a professor at UC Berkeley and Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday for their analyses of economic governance - the way authority is exercised in companies and economic systems.

Williamson, 77, is the Edgar F. Kaiser professor emeritus of business, economics, and law at the university.  Ostrom is a political science and professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University.

Wiliamson was honored for his analysis of economic governance and for developing a theory in which business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution, according to the of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Economic Sciences Prize Committee.

The committee noted that "over the last three decades these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention."

At a press conference Monday on the Berkeley campus, Williamson said he was "gratified" by the honor and hopes that in the future "organizations will play a more prominent role in the study of economic activity."

Williamson joked that he told his son, who is staying with him: If the phone rings Monday morning, answer it.

The prize marks the fifth Nobel in economics for the university and the 21st overall in fields including physics, chemistry and literature.

"We congratulate Oliver on this well-deserved honor for his groundbreaking work in economics," Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said in a statement. "He takes his place as the fifth Berkeley economics professor to win the Nobel Prize and further continues the remarkable contributions UC Berkeley has made to this field."

Williamson is the author of the economics classic "Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications," and its sequel, "The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting."

Ostrom was the first woman to win the prize since it was founded in 1968, and the fifth woman to win a Nobel award this year - a Nobel record.

Ostrom, who has devoted her career to studying the interaction of people and natural resources, told the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences by telephone that she was surprised by the Nobel.

"There are many, many people who have struggled mightily and to be chosen for this prize is a great honor," she said. "I'm still a little bit in shock."

The academy cited Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance," saying her work had demonstrated how common property can be successfully managed by groups using it.

"Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized," the academy said. "Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories."

One notable publication Ostrom wrote in 1990 examined both successful and unsuccessful ways of governing natural resources - forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands and irrigation system - that are used by individuals.

Issues of governance, or the rules by which authority is exercised in companies and economies, have been at the heart of the ongoing world economic crisis. The failure by boards of directors, for instance, to police excessive compensation, or prevent bonuses that reward excessive risk taking, can be considered a corporate governance issue.

The economics prize was the last Nobel award to be announced this year. It's not one of the original Nobel Prizes, but was created by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel's memory.

Nobel Prize winners receive 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million), a gold medal and diploma from the Swedish king on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

In the biggest surprise of this year's awards, President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

In other awards, UC San Francisco scientists Elizabeth H. Blackburn along with fellow Americans Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

The physics prize was split between Mountain View researcher Charles K. Kao, who helped develop fiberoptic cable, and Americans Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith who invented the "eye" in digital cameras.

Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath of Israel shared the chemistry prize for their atom-by-atom description of ribosomes.

Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller won the literature prize.

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