Mark Granovetter

The work. Granovetter is a sociologist with three ideas economists borrowed: weak ties carry the job leads (1973), markets are embedded in social relations (1985), and collective behavior tips when enough people cross a personal threshold (1978).

The case for. The committee has crowned a psychologist and a political scientist, and network economics is now a serious field built on his foundation.

The case against. He is not an economist, the papers are fifty years old, and a networks prize could go to the economists who formalized them.

The KmikeyM angle. Every KmikeyM vote is a threshold model: nobody moves until enough others have, and Granovetter wrote the math in 1978.