Maskin, Eric Stark

Maskin, Eric Stark,

1950–, American economist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Harvard, 1976. He was on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977–84) and Harvard (1985–2000) before joining (2000) the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. With Leonid HurwiczHurwicz, Leonid
, 1917–2008, Polish-American economist and statistician, b. Russia., grad. Univ. of Warsaw, 1938. Educated in the law, he subsequently studied economics in London, Geneva, and, after immigrating (1940) to the United States, Chicago and worked as an
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 and Roger MyersonMyerson, Roger Bruce,
1951–, American economist, b. Boston, Mass., Ph.D. Harvard, 1976. He has taught at Northwestern Univ. (1976–2001) and the Univ. of Chicago (2001–).
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, Maskin was awarded the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. Maskin and Myerson extended Hurwicz's work on mechanism design theory, a branch of game theory (see games, theory ofgames, theory of,
group of mathematical theories first developed by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. A game consists of a set of rules governing a competitive situation in which from two to n
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) that examines what rules provide the incentives that produce the most desirable result; they provided tools for social scientists to explain how individuals, institutions, and markets interact. Maskin also has worked on the theory of income inequality, the study of intellectual property rights, political economy, and other aspects of economics.