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
I don't want to make public statements about issues that I have not studied in detail.
Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.
Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.
I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem.
If banks anticipate government will come to the rescue should the credit market go badly awry, they may make loans that would otherwise be imprudent, e.g. subprime loans with little prospect of repayment.
Much theoretical work, of course, focuses on existing economic institutions. The theorist wants to explain or forecast the economic or social outcomes that these institutions generate.
Of course, MIT was notable not just for its faculty but also for its students. And, facing such extremely bright kids as a rookie teacher was something like being thrown to the wolves.
If budget planning requires gathering information from people who may not always have the incentive to disclose that information, then the principles of mechanism design can definitely be of use in such planning.
The Nobel Prize is not very important for the winners - they are usually pretty successful people already. But it is valuable as a way of drawing the public's attention to important work in economics.
It wasn't that Harvard was deliberately trying to overwork me, but I think I had a tendency to take on more things out of enthusiasm than were good for me.
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.