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. Eric Maskin Read Quote
Economic forecasting has actually got pretty good over the years, though admittedly, we don’t always get it right. Eric Maskin Read Quote
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. Eric Maskin Read Quote
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. Eric Maskin Read Quote
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. Eric Maskin Read Quote
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. Eric Maskin Read Quote
Specifically, in the software industry, progress is highly sequential: progress is typically made through a large number of small steps, each building on the previous ones. Eric Maskin Read Quote
The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the ‘engineering’ side of economic theory. Eric Maskin Read Quote
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. Eric Maskin Read Quote
There are some things that we value as a public good that the markets can’t deliver, like clean air. Eric Maskin Read Quote
