Eric Maskin Quotes

Pretty much, you point to a problem and good reasoning about why people are doing what they are doing and what constraints they face in terms of how others will behave, and you're looking at a problem that could be improved upon by game-theoretic reasoning.

In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way.

If budget planning requires gathering information from people who may not always have the incentive to disclose that information, then the principles of mechanism design can definitely be of use in such planning.

You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.

Final-offer arbitration should have great appeal for the daring (the risk seekers) who play against the timid (the risk avoiders).

At gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck.

Game theory, however, deals only with the way in which ultrasmart, all knowing people should behave in competitive situations, and has little to say to Mr. X as he confronts the morass of his problem.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: 'Do you want to pick door #2?' Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?

I've always been kind of a strategic thinking person - I love sports for instance, but my interest in sports is 'cause I love watching strategy in action or playing it. I'm not into the drama so much, of the physical action. I'm interested in the coach and how he's strategizing.

He shouldn't have resigned over that game. It was not a bad performance; in fact it was quite a good one for England. I would not have resigned under those circumstances.

It has been said that figures rule the world. Maybe. But I am sure that figures show us whether it is being ruled well or badly.

Pure politics is merely the calculus of combinations and of chances.

There are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.

That's right, kid. Never play an ace if a two will do.

Football is like chess, only without the dice.

I think that what we want to do as we continue to move forward is look at the various points that have been made.We're looking forward to the appointment of a monitor so that we can continue to do some of the things that we've been doing.

To venture an opinion is like moving a piece at chess: it may be taken, but it forms the beginning of a game that is won.

Sometimes you have to lose a piece to win a game.

If a player is not performing, there are two ways of looking at it. You wait for performance to come, or maybe the moment has arrived where you have to change. I could go either way.

I don't believe in psychology. I believe in good moves

You can learn much about life from a checker game: surrender one to take two; don't make two moves at one time; move up, not down; and when you reach the top, you may move as you like.

What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.

There are fixed rules in chess, and no one knows how the game will end.