Monday, October 15, 2007

Time for Mechanism Design

The Royal Swedish Academy has just announced that the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2007 is shared by Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory."

Obviously, it's another triumph for the game theory community. However, although Robert Wilson and Paul Milgrom, among others, have largely contributed to this field, particularly to auction theory, they are unlucky (maybe too "practical"?) to win the title in that a maximum of three laureates may be selected per award.

For more information and scientific background, see here and here. And unsurprisingly, their original contributing articles are as follows:

Hurwicz. L. (1960) "Optimality and informational efficiency in resource allocation processes", in Arrow, Karlinand Suppes (eds.), Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, Stanford University Press.

Hurwicz L. (1972) "On informationally decentralized systems", in Radner and McGuire, Decision and Organization, North-Holland.

Maskin E. (1977) "Nash equilibrium and welfare optimality". Paper presented at the summer workshop of the Econometric Society in Paris, June 1977. Published 1999 in the Review of Economic Studies 66, 23–38.

Myerson R. (1981) "Optimal auction design", Mathematics of Operations Research 6, 58–73

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