Nomo michael hoefner http://www.zwo5.de · CC BY-SA 3.0

Eric Maskin helped lay the mathematical foundations of mechanism design — the branch of economics that works backward from a desired outcome to figure out what rules or incentives would actually produce it, used today in fields from auction design to regulatory policy. He shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson for that work. Maskin has held professorships at Harvard, Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study, and continues as the Adams University Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard.