Professor Eric Maskin giving the keynote address on 'How to Make the Right Decisions without knowing People's Preferences: An Introduction to Mechanism Design' at the Warwick Economics Summit 2014.
Eric Maskin is an American Economist and Nobel laureate. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2007, alongside Leonard Hurwicz and Roger B. Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". He has also made contributions to game theory, contract theory, social choice theory, political economy, and other areas of economics.
Maskin received his A.B. and Ph.D from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University. He is currently Adams University Professor at Harvard.
In his prize lecture, on 8th December, 2007, Maskin said "I offer a brief introduction to the part of mechanism design called implementation theory, which, given a social goal, characterizes when we can design a mechanism whose predicted outcomes (i.e., the set of equilibrium outcomes) coincide with the desirable outcomes, according to that goal." You can read the rest of Maskin's prize lecture here http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2007/maskin_lecture.pdf.
