Who Won the Nobel Prize for This Work and Why Was One of the Creators Excluded?

The 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Robert C. Merton and Myron Scholes for developing 'a new method to determine the value of derivatives'. Fischer Black, who was a co-creator of the seminal Black-Scholes-Merton formula, was unfortunately excluded from the prize because he had passed away in 1995.

The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. His contribution was explicitly mentioned in the Nobel announcement as being foundational to the award.