Eric Maskin

Origins and early life

Eric Stark Maskin was born in New York City on 12 December 1950, into a Jewish family, and spent his youth in Alpine, New Jersey, leaving Tenafly High School in 1968. He read mathematics at Harvard, took his degree in 1972 and a doctorate in applied mathematics there in 1976, with a year in between as a visiting student at Darwin College in Cambridge.

Work and career

He was a research fellow at Jesus College in Cambridge, then taught at MIT from 1977 and at Harvard from 1985, spent eleven years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2000, and returned to Harvard in 2011 as Adams University Professor. Where Myerson asked how to get people to tell the truth, Maskin asked a prior question: given a goal a society wants — an efficient allocation, a fair division, a chosen candidate — do rules exist at all under which self-interested players will reach it, and how would one know?

His answer, implementation theory, gives a condition on the goal itself, now called Maskin monotonicity, which a goal must satisfy for any such rules to exist, and a construction of the rules when it does. It set the boundary of what institutional design can and cannot do, and the whole field of mechanism design is built inside that boundary. He advanced the idea of Markov perfect equilibrium with Jean Tirole, advised the Bank of Italy on its bond auctions in the 1990s, and directs the Jerusalem Summer School in Economic Theory at the Hebrew University. He shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson.