Isophoric News · Sunday, October 18, 2026
Hall and Woodford win Nobel in economics; committee uses an ice cream menu to explain "sticky prices"
Robert Hall of Stanford University and Michael Woodford of Columbia University won this year's Nobel Prize in economics "for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization," the prize committee announced Monday, NPR reported. Committee member Timo Boppart illustrated their work with an ice cream menu: "Firms instead set the price of this ice cream for a whole season." NPR's Planet Money newsletter explains that "sticky prices" are a cornerstone of New Keynesian economics, which it says the prize-winning work helped lay the foundations for, and that Woodford's work helped lay groundwork for the Federal Reserve's "forward guidance" during the Great Recession.
