Important personalitiesBack

Elinor "Lin" Ostrom (born Elinor Claire Awan; August 7, 1933 – June 12, 2012) was an American political economist.

She was awarded the 2009 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson, for "her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons". She was the first, and to date, the only woman to win the prize in this category. Her work was associated with the new institutional economics and the resurgence of political economy.

Ostrom lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and served on the faculty of both Indiana University and Arizona State University. She held the rank of Distinguished Professor at Indiana University and was the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington, as well as Research Professor and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University in Tempe. She was a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP), managed by Virginia Tech and funded by USAID She and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, advised the journal Transnational Corporations Review beginning in 2008.