Eric Maskin
Eric Maskin
Eric Stark Maskinis an American economist and 2007 Nobel laureate recognized with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". He is the Adams University Professor at Harvard University. Until 2011, he was the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a visiting lecturer with the rank of professor at Princeton University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth12 December 1950
CountryUnited States of America
What we mean by an outcome will naturally depend on the context. Thus, for a government charged with delivering public goods, an outcome will consist of the quantities provided of such goods as intercity highways, national defense and security, environmental protection, and public education together with the arrangements by which they are financed.
How do we ensure in the case of public goods that they are provided at all, and that they are provided at the right level, taking into account citizens' preferences?
Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed.
At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I'm especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics.
Through meteorology, we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise.
The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory.
The market is no god - it cannot solve every problem.
The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods.
Most policy makers embrace a religious-like belief that the market can and should solve every problem.
Markets work well with goods that economists call private goods.
In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.
I'm not a housing market expert, and I don't want to pretend to be one.
I was born in New York City but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey.
I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating.