STOCKHOLM -- Two Americans and a German won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Tuesday for refining the ideas behind games like poker to predict how companies and markets work.


The winners were John Harsanyi, a Hungarian-born American, now at the University of California at Berkeley; John Nash, of Bluefield, West Virginia, now at Princeton University; and Reinhard Selten, born in what was then Breslau, Germany and now at the University of Bonn.


The three economists will share 7 million krona ($933,000) given with the prize, which is awarded by the Swedish Central Bank in memory of industrialist Alfred Nobel.


Taking the concepts behind common games such as chess and poker, the economists created new mathematical formulas in which players are given varying degrees of information about their own position and the playing field.


Applying the constant give and take and speculation between the players, the researchers came up with models for predicting the decisions of companies and governments.