Reuters.

President Obama has gotten all the attention with his undeserved Noble Peace Prize, but this is the year of the femme.

Five women won the Noble this year, an all-time record. And unlike President Obama prize, their awards were on more objective since one can only win a prize in, say, literature after accomplishments not on their intentions to write a great novel.

And this year saw the first woman ever win the Noble in Economics: American Elinor Ostrom. She shared the honor with fellow patriot Oliver Williamson.

Her citation noted her pioneering work on how local changes often influence the larger project in society. Ms. Ostrom is a professor at Indiana University.

Her work challenged the view that when people share a finite resource, they’ll end up destroying it. Such “a tragedy of the commons” argues that resources that are important for the common good need to be highly regulated, or privatized.

It’s an area of research that she said was relevant to questions about global warming, and suggests that decisions by individuals can help solve the problem even as governments work to reach an international agreement.

“Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, [Ms.] Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories,” the Nobel judges noted.

That’s because over time, people often develop institutions, social networks and ways of interacting that solves the problem. Lobstermen in Maine, for example, have come to informally regulate, and restrict entry to, the areas where they work. Where these “lobster gangs” are prevalent, there are more lobsters.

On a larger scale, these social networks don’t always work as well, notes Yale University environmental economist Matthew Kotchen — there are fewer lobsters, for example, further away from Maine harbors. What’s important, he says, is that Ms. Ostrom’s work points out the importance of the networks that many economists had ignored, in part, because they couldn’t come up with elegant models to describe how they worked.

At least somebody earned their Noble this week. Obama learn something.