Two Americans will split $1.2 million for jointly winning the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. The pair conducted ground-breaking research on how companies and people find and select one another.

The work of Alvin Roth, from Harvard University, and Lloyd Shapley, from the University of California, Los Angeles, applied market design and matching theory as it relates to marriage, school choice and organ donations.

The economics prize is not technically a Nobel prize since it was created in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank in honor or Alfred Nobel, the industrialist who created and funded the original five Nobel prizes (medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace).

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