Eric Maskin Quotes
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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.
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Markets work well with goods that economists call private goods.
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A contingent bailout policy - implicit or explicit - must be coupled with some regulation of what banks can and cannot do. For example, a ban on lending to uncreditworthy customers might well make sense.
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Through meteorology, we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise.
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The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory.
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The market is no god - it cannot solve every problem.
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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.
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Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most policy makers embrace a religious-like belief that the market can and should solve every problem.
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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.
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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.
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I choose questions to work on according to how much they excite me.
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The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods.
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In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.
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Devising a mechanism is a lot like solving a puzzle - and gives you the same kind of kick.