$1.5 Million Prize? Is The Dollar Really That Weak Now?

Given that I have revealed myself to only support the awarding of Nobel Prizes according to the will of Alfred Nobel, I suppose I'm therefore automatically against the "Nobel Prize" in Economics.  Alas.  I'm not terribly familiar with the three winners of this year's prize, but to make a long story short, they won for helping to determine under what circumstances a market or an auction will be the best method of distributing resources–cars, FCC spectrum licenses, ice cream cones, literally anything that people could possibly want.  In doing so, they laid the foundations for the whole "mechanism design" branch of economics which is now rapidly becoming the hot field.  If you want a very recent (and potentially ground-breaking) example, Radiohead's new album is ideal.  The band released the album on their website and asked people to pay whatever they thought the album was worth.  Mechanism design explores similar markets and seeks to create mechanisms that will achieve some sort of desired goal–maximizing revenue, maximizing record circulation, etc.  So the work of these three economists has been, and will continue to be, extremely important.  But I'm still not acquiescing and calling them true Nobel laureates.