Douglas North was born on 5th November 1920 in Cambridge. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, from where he graduated in 1942. After the Second World War he returned to Berkeley to pursue a PhD in economics. He claims to have learnt most on economic theory and how to reason like an economist while playing chess with Don Gordon while working at the University of Washington in Seattle[1].
In his writings, he tries to explain in which cases institutions may be efficient and why in fact institutions producing inefficient results tend to exist and be perpetuated. Since 1990 his research has been directed on the issue of how individuals make choices under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity. North and Robert William Fogel received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 “for having renewed research in economic history […] in order to explain economic and institutional change”[2].
[1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-autobio.html# , last retrieved on 20th February 2012
[2] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/press.html , last retrieved on 20th February 2012
New Institutional Economics 