Her research was conducted in India, Nepal and Kenya. She was cited for work into how fish stocks can be husbanded for the benefit of all. She has spent her academic life as an economist investigating how people co-operate rather than are motivated by self-interest.
The award of the Nobel prize to Elinor Ostrom marks a departure for economics. It was not just that the prize went to a woman for the first time: it was that Ostrom was working in a branch outside the financial mainstream. The mayhem caused to the global economy by market fundamentalism made it unlikely that a member of the "unfettered markets are best" school would win this year. But it was significant that the judges chose someone whose work is relevant to debates about resource use and the future of the planet.
Ostrom's work has been based around the need to find an answer to how resources are managed in the face of population growth and increasing prosperity. The conventional wisdom was that there were only two options - for the state to be in charge, or privatisation. As the Nobel judges noted, Ostrom challenged the orthodoxy through in-depth studies of commonly managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins – and found that the outcomes were better than predicted by standard theories.