Growing up in Alpine
Eric Stark Maskin was born in New York City on December 12, 1950, into a Jewish family, and grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey, a town of fewer than a thousand people. Alpine was too small to have its own secondary schools, so he went to junior high and high school in neighbouring Tenafly, graduating in 1968.
At Tenafly High he was lucky, he says, to have dedicated teachers, above all his calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened his eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics. That set him on the path to a mathematics degree at Harvard College, where he studied algebra with Pierre Samuel and Richard Brauer and analysis with George Mackey and Lars Ahlfors, all of them inspiring and some of them, he recalls, amusingly eccentric.
A revelation in Kenneth Arrow’s class
Almost by accident, Maskin wandered into a course on information economics taught by Kenneth Arrow, the Nobel laureate who became his doctoral adviser. Much of it was devoted to Leonid Hurwicz’s work in the new field of mechanism design, the study of how to build rules and institutions that achieve social goals when the people involved have private information and their own interests. To Maskin it was a revelation: it had the precision, rigour and sometimes the beauty of pure mathematics, and it addressed problems of real social importance.
His PhD, awarded in 1976, was nominally in applied mathematics, but Harvard’s programme allowed him to take a great deal of economics, including courses where he first worked with his classmate and future co-laureate Roger Myerson. His dissertation showed that, for any range of preferences, the problem of finding a fair way to combine individual preferences into social choices, as framed in Arrow’s famous impossibility theorem, is solvable exactly when the problem of finding a procedure that cannot be manipulated is solvable.
Cambridge and Maskin monotonicity
Arrow arranged a postdoctoral fellowship for him at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he worked with Frank Hahn and began lifelong collaborations with Jean-Jacques Laffont and Partha Dasgupta. He remembers the year as marvellous in every way, from college life and London theatre to touring Europe, but its true highlights were weekly tutorial sessions with Hahn. There he became absorbed by a question inspired by Hurwicz: under what circumstances is it possible to design a mechanism, a game or procedure, that will always produce a given social goal?
After struggling for most of the year, he realised that a property now called “Maskin monotonicity” was the key. If a social goal does not satisfy it, no mechanism can reliably achieve it; if it does, and a weak condition called no veto power also holds, a mechanism can be built, and his proof showed how to construct one. His original construction was cumbersome, and he remained grateful to the economist Karl Vind, his discussant at a conference that summer, for suggesting a neat simplification. He presented the result at the Econometric Society’s summer meeting in Paris in 1977 and wrote it up that autumn as “Nash Equilibrium and Welfare Optimality”. He did not publish it in a journal for twenty years, because it was already well known as a working paper.
Why implementation theory matters
The Nobel committee’s own explanation used a piano. Erika owns one and Peter might buy it, but neither knows how much the other values it. Ideally they should trade whenever Peter values the piano more than Erika does. Yet in almost any bargaining procedure each has a reason to shade the truth, Erika pretending the piano is worth more to her and Peter pretending it is worth less, so some good trades never happen. Mechanism design asks which procedure does best given those incentives, and what the best possible result is. Maskin’s question went one step further: even when a good procedure exists, can it be designed so that every way of playing it leads to a good result?
A mechanism can go wrong in a subtle way. Even if one way of playing it leads to a good outcome, people might settle into another equilibrium that leads to a bad one; conventional double auctions, for example, can have equilibria with very little trade. The Nobel committee said Maskin gave the first general solution to the problem of designing a mechanism all of whose equilibria are optimal, and that the resulting implementation theory is a key part of modern mechanism design.
In plain terms, Maskin showed which social goals can be built into rules so that self-interested people, acting strategically, will end up delivering them anyway, and which goals no set of rules can guarantee. That makes it possible to tell, before a procedure is adopted, whether it can work at all. His work with Laffont showed limits on what any voluntary trading mechanism can achieve, and with John Riley he analysed which auction designs sellers prefer, helping to explain the menus of prices and auction formats that actually emerge in markets.
MIT, Harvard and Princeton
Maskin taught at MIT from 1977 to 1984, where lunches at a single faculty-club table with Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani and Robert Solow were, he recalls, always a treat, and where Peter Diamond acted like an older brother. Among his first doctoral students were Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole, who became co-authors and close friends; with Tirole he developed the concept of Markov perfect equilibrium, widely used to study competition over time.
In 1985 he moved to Harvard, where his colleagues included Janos Kornai and Amartya Sen; with Kornai he supervised a cohort of Chinese doctoral students, and with Sen he taught social choice theory. The senior theory group at Harvard, which included Andreu Mas-Colell, Jerry Green, Oliver Hart, Drew Fudenberg, Michael Whinston and Martin Weitzman, was, he wrote, rivalled by few others in the profession. His students included Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, both later Nobel laureates. In 2000 he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in 2011 he returned to Harvard as Adams University Professor.
Putting theory to work
Maskin’s research has practical reach. In the 1990s he advised the Bank of Italy on the operation of its government bond auctions. With Sandeep Baliga he wrote on mechanism design for environmental problems, where polluters know more about their own costs than regulators do. With James Bessen he argued that in fast-moving, sequential industries such as software, strong patent protection can actually reduce innovation, pointing to evidence from the extension of patents to software in the 1980s.
He has also applied his work to how people vote. With the legal scholar Ned Foley he has proposed a reform of ranked-choice voting, called Total Vote Runoff and based on Baldwin’s method, that is designed to ensure the winner has majority support and to elect more broadly acceptable candidates. His current research compares electoral rules, examines the causes of inequality and studies how coalitions form.
Jewish roots
Maskin was born into a Jewish family and grew up in Alpine; he has not written publicly about religious practice. When he won the Nobel Prize in 2007, the Jewish community of Stockholm counted him among that year’s three Jewish economics laureates and invited him to its traditional Nobel Shabbat in the Great Synagogue; he wrote to say he regretted that the Nobel schedule had already filled his Saturday.
He has strong ties to Israeli scholarship: for many years he has directed the Jerusalem Summer School in Economic Theory at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a long-running meeting place for economic theorists.
A builder of the profession
Maskin is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society and the European Economic Association and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he was president of the Econometric Society in 2003. He has taught and lectured worldwide, including as a visiting professor at Covenant University in Nigeria from 2014, chairs the advisory board of the International Economics Olympiad for secondary school students, and in June 2026 became president of the International Economic Association. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambodia in 2010, was named an honoris causa professor by HEC Paris in 2017 and served on the social sciences jury of India’s Infosys Prize in 2018.
In his Nobel autobiography he lists the debts of a career: inspiring teachers, students, colleagues and friends, and the good fortune of entering the field just as mechanism design was beginning to bloom. The word “luck”, he wrote, appears repeatedly in his story, and that is no accident.
Legacy
Hurwicz asked which rules work when people keep secrets and pursue their own interests. Maskin answered a sharper question: which goals can rules guarantee, whatever equilibrium people end up in, and how can such rules be built? His answer, and the methods he and his students developed, now underpin the design of auctions, regulation, voting procedures and public projects.
For ordinary people the effect is mostly invisible but real: in how governments sell bonds and licenses, how environmental and other regulations are structured, how proposals for fairer elections are tested, and in the generation of economists, among them several Nobel laureates, whom he trained.
Sources & further reading
Eric S. Maskin, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Information for the Public: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2007, NobelPrize.org · Eric Maskin, Jewish Virtual Library · Preisgabe (Nobel-Schabbat 2007), Jüdische Allgemeine · Eric Maskin, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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