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modern · 1917 to 2008 and after
Most game theory takes the rules as given and asks how to play. Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson flipped the question: given the outcome you want, how should you design the game?
Facts reviewed 2026-07-11.
Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson are the economists most associated with mechanism design, the branch of game theory that runs the logic in reverse. Hurwicz, who lived from 1917 to 2008 and founded the field, asked a question no one had framed so sharply: if you know the outcome you want but the participants have private information and their own interests, how do you design the rules of the game so that their self-interested play produces that outcome?
Maskin and Myerson extended the framework into a complete engineering discipline. Together the three turned game theory from a science of analyzing games into a science of building them.
The central problem is that people know things you do not, their true costs, values, and preferences, and they will misreport them if it serves their interest. Mechanism design asks how to structure incentives so that honesty is the participants' best strategy, so the rules extract the truth as a byproduct of self-interest. Myerson's revelation principle showed, remarkably, that for a wide class of problems you can restrict attention to mechanisms where telling the truth is optimal, which made the whole field tractable.