[3] With Alvin E. Roth, Shapley won the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.

He served in the United States Army Air Corps in Chengdu, China and received the Bronze Star decoration for breaking the Soviet weather code.

After working for one year at the RAND Corporation, he went to Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in 1953[8] based on the thesis "Additive and non-additive set functions".

In 1950, while a graduate student, Shapley invented the board game So Long Sucker, along with Mel Hausner, John Forbes Nash, and Martin Shubik.

[10] Israeli economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann considered Shapley to be "the greatest game theorist of all time.