GMU Profs Weigh-In on Yesterday's Nobel Prize

Pete Boettke writing in today's Wall Street Journal:

Yesterday Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for their pioneering work in the field of "mechanism design." Strangely, some have used this occasion to disparage free-market economics. But the truth is the deserving recipients owe a direct debt to free-market thinkers who came before them.

Mechanism design is an area of economic research that focuses on how institutional structures can be manipulated by changing the rules of the game in order to produce socially optimal results. The best intentions for the public good will go astray if the institutional arrangements are not consistent with the self-interest of decision makers.

And Alex Tabarrok writing for Reason Magazine:

Overall, mechanism design increases our appreciation of markets, if only by showing how difficult it is to produce good outcomes while respecting the constraints that markets must satisfy. In a sense, mechanism design is to markets what genetic algorithms are to life. Theorists may one day design a better market mechanism or a better genetic code but for now the gains will come from using our deeper understanding to gently improve something that's already pretty marvelous.