After society has decided on a social choice rule-a recipe for choosing the optimal social alternative (or alternatives) on the basis of individuals' preferences over the set of all social alternatives-the social planner still faces the problem of how to implement that rule. In particular, the planner may not know individuals' preferences. He might attempt to elicit them, but this may not be an easy task, even abstracting from communication costs. If individuals know the rule by which the planner selects alternatives on the basis of reported preferences, they may have an incentive to report falsely.

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About Eric Maskin

Eric Maskin was American nobel laureate in economics. Eric Stark Maskin is an American economist and mathematician. He was jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". Read more on Wikipedia →

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