The Economist www.economist.com) reported that ?a theory of an intelligently guided invisible hand? recently won the Nobel Prize. But before you get too excited - no, this Nobel Prize was not offered in biology:

?Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson won their third-shares of the $1.5m prize for shaping a branch of economics that has had a broad impact, both in academia, in subjects such as incentive theory, game theory and the political science of institutions, and in the real world. It affects everything from utility regulation and auctions to structuring the pay of company executives and the design of elections. Mr Hurwicz must be especially delighted as, aged 90, he is the oldest ever Nobel winner, and may have thought his chance had gone. He worked long ago with one previous winner, Kenneth Arrow, and was the graduate adviser to another, Daniel McFadden. One of his most influential papers was published when he was 55, about the same age his co-winners are now, which proves, if nothing else, that making big intellectual breakthroughs is not exclusively a young person's game.

Mechanism-design theory aims to give the invisible hand a helping hand, in particular by focusing on how to minimise the economic cost of ?asymmetric information??the problem of dealing with someone who knows more than you do. Trading efficiently under asymmetric information is hard, for how do you decide what price to offer someone for something?a product, say, or their labour?if you do not know at what price they would sell it? On the one hand, you may not offer enough to get them to deliver the product or work, or at least do so adequately; on the other, you may overpay, wasting resources that might have been better used elsewhere.?

Is a Nobel Prize foreseeable for intelligent design theory in the natural sciences? If so, who are the potential candidates?