Lloyd Stowell Shapley is a professor emeritus of economics and mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been awarded, with Alvin E. Roth, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012 for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.

Shapley and Roth, working independently of one another, addressed the central economic problem of how to match different agents as efficiently as possible to improve the performance of markets — for example, how to match new doctors with hospitals, prospective students with schools, or patients needing organ transplants with donors.

Shapley is widely considered one of the fathers of game theory. His research has focused on non-cooperative market models, political games, cost allocation and organization theory. He made some of the earliest theoretical contributions to research on market design and matching, in the 1950s and 1960s. Shapley designed theoretical constructs and algorithms to study and compare different matching methods, how people and companies find and select one another in everything from marriage to school choice to jobs to organ donations.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1923, Shapley earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1948 and his PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1953 where he studied alongside John Nash, a fellow Nobel laureate He worked for Rand Corporation as a research mathematician and taught at Princeton before joining the University of California, Los Angeles in 1981.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2012/shapley.html