Elinor Awan Ostrom

Ostrom, Elinor Awan, 1933–2012, American political economist, b. Los Angeles, Ph.D. Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1965. She was on the faculty of the Univ. of Indiania, Bloomington, from 1965 until her death, and was also a research professor at Arizona State Univ. Ostrom studied how individuals interact through sets of rules, institutions, and other arrangements to maintain resourses held in common, and in 2009 she shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences with Oliver Williamson for this work. She showed that, contrary to traditional presumptions, individuals who have access to a shared resource do not inevitably overexploit or destroy the resource. She was the first woman to receive the prize.

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