On October 18th, 1988, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1988 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Professor Maurice Allais, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, France, for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources.

The foremost contribution of Maurice Allais was made in the 1940s when he continued to develop Walras's and Pareto's work by providing increasingly rigorous mathematical formulations of market equilibrium and the efficiency properties of markets. On the basis of mathematical models of households' and firms' planning and choice, he introduced a very general formulation of the conditions for market equilibrium. Allais's two pioneering works are A la Recherche d'une Discipline Economique, published during the war in 1943, and Economie et Interet, 1947. A second edition of the first book appeared in 1952 as Traite d'Economie Pure. Each of these studies was extensive; the first comprised about 900 pages and the second approximately 800.

Allais's distinguished contribution may, to some extent, be regarded as a parallel to two important works published around the same time in the Anglo-Saxon research community: Value and Capital (1939) by Sir John Hicks, and Foundations of Economic Analvsis (1947) by Paul A. Samuelson. Hicks was awarded the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences in 1972 and Samuelson in 1970. The similarity lies primarily in the objective of providing a comprehensive and rigorous interpretation of economic theory. The main difference is perhaps that Allais's formulation is more general and includes an analysis of, e.g. households' and firms' long-run (or intertemporal) planning. The work of Allais served as a basis for the analysis of market equilibrium and social efficiency using more advanced mathematical methods carried out by his pupil, Gerard Debreu (laureate in 1983), concurrently, and sometimes in collaboration with, Kenneth Arrow (laureate in 1972).

Allais's two monumental works also contain many results which represent very early contributions in areas that were not explored until much later on. He used new mathematical methods to analyze the stability of equilibria, i.e., the conditions under which an economy - after a disturbance - will return to equilibrium through price formation. In his 1948 study, Allais anticipated important results in research which led to the modern theory of economic growth in the late 1950s and early 1960s.