Works
- The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Discounting or with Incomplete Information, Econometrica 54(3), with Drew Fudenberg, 1986
- Nash Equilibrium and Welfare Optimality, Review of Economic Studies 66(1); circulated as an MIT working paper in 1977, 1999
In Thinking Tools
Known for
An economic theorist who shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson for mechanism design. He showed which social goals can be implemented by a mechanism whose equilibria give exactly the desired outcomes (the condition now called Maskin monotonicity), and with Drew Fudenberg proved the folk theorem for repeated games with discounting: if players are patient enough, any feasible outcome that gives everyone more than their minimum can be sustained.