[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (comments and images to follow)]:
From the Nobel Prize site, the final one of the year:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007 jointly to Leonid Hurwicz (University of Minnesota, MN, USA), Eric S. Maskin (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA), and Roger B. Myerson (University of Chicago, IL, USA), for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”.
No, I did not really know what mechanism design theory was either. Some of it sounds rather interesting, in fact. The website has a breakdown of the key contributions and ideas here. Once again, I found that NPR had a really nice radio chat about the prize. You can hear that here. In that audio file, you can learn the origin of this post’s title…. if you cannot already guess.
-cvj
