Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday for their work on improving the design of contracts, the deals that bind together employers and their workers, or companies and their customers.

Dr. Holmstrom, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has had a particular influence on executive pay practices. Dr. Hart, a professor at Harvard, has contributed to the debate about the outsourcing of public services like prisons and garbage collection.

“Modern economies are held together by innumerable contracts,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the prize, said Monday morning. “Their analysis of optimal contractual arrangements lays an intellectual foundation for designing policies and institutions in many areas, from bankruptcy legislation to political constitutions.”

The prize committee in recent years has shied away from grand economic theories, instead rewarding economists who develop careful insights about smaller questions. Macroeconomics, the field devoted to those broader questions, has fallen into something of an existential crisis in recent years. There is, for now, greater certainty about the value of work on a smaller scale.