Eric Maskin

Eric S. Maskin is an American economist whose work on mechanism design helped establish conditions under which social goals can be implemented through strategic rules. He shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Mechanism design: The study of rules that align strategic behavior with desired social outcomes. Maskin helped formalize when a mechanism can implement a social choice rule.
Implementation theory: The study of whether institutional rules can produce a specified social choice in equilibrium. This is the branch of mechanism design most closely associated with Maskin’s foundational work.
Leonid Hurwicz: An economist who founded mechanism design and shared the 2007 economics Nobel Prize. Hurwicz’s framework provided the foundation for Maskin’s implementation research.
Auction theory: The economic analysis of auction formats, bidding strategies, and allocation outcomes. Auction design is a prominent application of strategic rule-making studied in mechanism design.
2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: The economics prize awarded to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson for mechanism-design foundations. The award recognized Maskin’s contribution to understanding mechanism design.
Social choice theory: The study of how individual preferences can be combined into collective decisions. Maskin’s implementation results ask which collective outcomes institutions can realize.
Maskin monotonicity: A condition requiring a social choice rule to preserve an outcome when support for it does not decline. Maskin identified this condition as necessary for implementation in Nash equilibrium.
Roger Myerson: An economist known for major contributions to game theory and mechanism design. Myerson shared the 2007 prize with Maskin for work on mechanism design.
Market design: The design of rules and institutions for allocating resources among participants. Maskin’s work informs the broader effort to make allocation rules achieve intended outcomes.
Mechanism design in practice: The use of strategic economic analysis to construct rules for markets and public institutions. Maskin’s theory helped make institutional rules objects of formal economic analysis.

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