Eric Maskin

In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.

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

It wasn't that Harvard was deliberately trying to overwork me, but I think I had a tendency to take on more things out of enthusiasm than were good for me.

I have a strong attachment to Harvard.

If I'm a bank, and I'm making risky loans, I have an incentive, if I can, to make those loans using other people's money: in other words, to make highly leveraged loans.

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

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

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.

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.

A contingent bailout policy - implicit or explicit - must be coupled with some regulation of what banks can and cannot do. For example, a ban on lending to uncreditworthy customers might well make sense.

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.

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.

The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods.

Markets work well with goods that economists call private goods.

If I buy a car, I use the car, you don't, and the market for cars works pretty well. But there are many other sorts of goods, often very important goods, which are not provided well through the market. Often, these go under the heading of public goods.

How do we ensure in the case of public goods that they are provided at all, and that they are provided at the right level, taking into account citizens' preferences?

The Nobel Prize is not very important for the winners - they are usually pretty successful people already. But it is valuable as a way of drawing the public's attention to important work in economics.

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

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.

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?

There is universal consensus among experts that the earth's atmosphere is heating up - and that we are responsible for it by putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We also know that the consequences of global warming are catastrophic. But how do we make sure that all countries reduce greenhouse gases?

What we mean by an outcome will naturally depend on the context. Thus, for a government charged with delivering public goods, an outcome will consist of the quantities provided of such goods as intercity highways, national defense and security, environmental protection, and public education together with the arrangements by which they are financed.

I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating.

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

I'm not a housing market expert, and I don't want to pretend to be one.