42 Quotes by Eric Maskin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.

Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.

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?