In October 2007, Hurwicz shared "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" with Eric Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study and Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." During a telephone interview, a member of the Nobel Foundation told Hurwicz and his wife that Hurwicz is the oldest person ever to win the Nobel Prize. Hurwicz said, "I hope that others who deserve it also got it." When he was asked what the most important part of mechanism design is, he said welfare economics. The three Nobel prize winners used game theory work by mathematician John Forbes Nash, to discover the best way to reach a good outcome, without forgetting individual people. Mechanism design has been used as a guide for talks and taxation, voting and elections, to design auctions such as those for communications bandwidth, elections and labor talks and for pricing business stocks.