Premi Nobel d'Economia 2007, concedit a Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin i Roger B. Myerson

Abstract

Economics is the study of institutions, or allocation mechanisms, which coordinate human actions aimed at satisfying human needs. Traditionally, economists concentrated their attention on a specific mechanism of social interaction: the market. In 1960 Hurwicz presented the theoretical tools to systematically consider alternative systems for coordinating economic activities. Unlike the design of a machine, where the coordination of all the pieces comes under the command of a single mind, the design of an economic mechanism should take two aspects into account: a) there are many decision units and each has its own goals which do not necessarily coincide, and b) information about needs, objectives, available resources and technology are dispersed among many actors and none of them knows all the data. Communication therefore becomes an essential tool for decision-making. Recent theoretical developments confirmed Hayek's intuition when, back in 1936, he claimed an epistemological status for dispersed knowledge analogous to the division of labour as the cornerstone on which to build economics as a social science. In the late 1950's Hurwicz formalized the theoretical foundations for designing decentralized economic mechanisms which explicitly consider dispersed knowledge and the limitations of economic actors to acquire, process and transmit information. At the end of the 1960's there was a second wave of innovations: if information is dispersed, actors may have no interest in behaving in accordance with the rules and avoid controls to prevent this. It is therefore essential to design self-regulated mechanisms to ensure that actors are encouraged to act according to the rules and provide the appropriate information. This new approach has influenced almost all economic theory in recent decades.