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" 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

Bright

Students

Teacher

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" Devising a mechanism is a lot like solving a puzzle - and gives you the same kind of kick. "

" 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. "

Eric Maskin

Rescue

Will

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I choose questions to work on according to how much they excite me. "

Eric Maskin

Work

Much

" If I'm a bank, and I'm making risky loans, I have an incentive, if I can, to make those loans using other people's money: in other words, to make highly leveraged loans. "

" I don't want to make public statements about issues that I have not studied in detail. "

" The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods. "

" If I buy a car, I use the car, you don't, and the market for cars works pretty well. But there are many other sorts of goods, often very important goods, which are not provided well through the market. Often, these go under the heading of public goods. "

Eric Maskin

Pretty

Car

" 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. "

" I probably learned most at MIT by teaching and working with Peter Diamond, who acted like a big brother to me during my time in the department. "

" Most policy makers embrace a religious-like belief that the market can and should solve every problem. "

" 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. "

" This may not be the most serious problem in the world, but it is a familiar one: How do you divide a piece of cake equally between two children and also make sure that each of them sees it as a fair division? "

" The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory. "

" 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. "

" Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist. "

" I have a strong attachment to Harvard. "

" I was born in New York City but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey. "

" I'm not a housing market expert, and I don't want to pretend to be one. "

" When a bank calls in a loan, it obviously hurts the customer in question. But it also adversely affects other banks that have lent to this borrower. They are now less likely to be repaid and so can't as readily lend to their own customers. "

" In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them. "

" Through meteorology, we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise. "

Eric Maskin

Say

Storm

" Markets work well with goods that economists call private goods. "

" I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating. "

" 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. "

" Many markets work best with little or no outside interference. But others - especially those subject to big 'externalities' - need a helping hand. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "