Because I’ve yet to find a good synopsis of what exactly Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, actually do, but what ever it is, it won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Their field of study appears to be how organizations structure themselves, which would seem to me more like anthropology or sociology, but there is always an overlap, particularly given the fact that the idea of the purely rational actor in a market has been challenged by recent events and the relatively new field of behavioral economics.

It appears that one of their discoveries is that competitive markets don’t always deliver the optimal results, and that cooperation frequently beats competition, which sounds to me like it’s straight out of anthropology.

Understand, however, that I have no clue what this actually means.