Quotes from Eric Maskin

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.

Many markets work best with little or no outside interference. But others - especially those subject to big 'externalities' - need a helping hand.

Most policy makers embrace a religious-like belief that the market can and should solve every problem.

The market is no god - it cannot solve every problem.

Devising a mechanism is a lot like solving a puzzle - and gives you the same kind of kick.

I was born in New York City but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey.

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.

Through meteorology, we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise.

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.

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.

There are some things that we value as a public good that the markets can't deliver, like clean air.

I like to work on a number of things simultaneously. If you're working on a variety of projects and if you get stuck on one of them, you can move to another without grinding your gears indefinitely.

In various countries around the world, assets that had previously been in the hands of governments were sold off to the private sector in the hope that this would lead to a more efficient allocation, that these assets would be put to better use.

I don't want to make public statements about issues that I have not studied in detail.

Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist.

I choose questions to work on according to how much they excite me.