French economist Jean Tirole has been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analysis of market power and regulation, reported BBC.
He has been recognised for his work taming powerful firms. Tirole won a prize of 8m Swedish krona (£692,000).
The 61-year-old economist has played a major role examining competition, and analysing how large firms should be regulated to prevent consumers being damaged by monopoly behaviour.
He is six years younger than the average age of Nobel economics laureates.
Regulators and competition authorities have obtained "a whole new set of tools" from Tirole's work, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the award.
Tirole, the second Frenchman to win a Nobel award this year, is "one of the most influential economists of our time," the jury said. "I'm really very grateful," Tirole said in his reaction.
"Many industries are dominated by a small number of large firms or a single monopoly," the jury said of Tirole's work. "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."
Before Tirole's work, governments and regulators often used simple rules such as capping prices for companies with a monopoly and banning co-operation between competitors, said the Royal Swedish Academy. Tirole showed that under some conditions, doing so can do more harm than good.
Last year, US academics Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller won for their "empirical analysis of asset prices," according to the awarding committee.
The committee said the trio's separate pieces of work had "laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices".
The awards will be presented on December 10, the anniversary of the prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.
The prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was set up in 1968. It was not one of the original awards set out in dynamite industrialist Mr Nobel's 1895 will.
