French economist Jean Tirole won the 2014 economics Nobel Prize for his analysis of market power and regulation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.
"Jean Tirole is one of the most influential economists of our time,'' the academy said. "Most of all he has clarified how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms.''
For about 30 years Tirole has researched market failures "has clarified how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms," the Academy said.
The economist will receive an 8 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million) prize.
2014 Nobel Prize Winners
The jury said that "left unregulated, such markets often produce socially undesirable results - prices higher than those motivated by costs, or unproductive firms that survive by blocking the entry of new and more productive ones."
Influential economist
Tirole, the second French citizen to be honored this year, is "one of the most influential economists of our time," the Academy said.
The 61-year-old economist works at the Toulouse School of Economics in France.
The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968. It was not part of the original group of awards set out in 1895 will of Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.
Economists from the United States have dominated the prize with only a few winners coming from other parts of the world since 1994.
While economists are rarely household names, previous winners include well-known figures such as Paul Krugman, Milton Friedman, Friedrich August von Hayek and Joseph Stiglitz.
The economics prize closed the 2014 Nobel Prize announcements.
Last week, Nobel judges announced the awards for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and the Nobel Peace Prize.
The awards will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.
Some material for this report came from Reuters.
