How Should Members of Parliament be Elected?
Public lecture by Professor Eric Maskin
(Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics)
This lecture was held on the 30 November 2007
The title of the lecture was “How Should Members of Parliament be Elected?” Professor Maskin was awarded the Nobel prize for his work in mechanism design theory. In this lecture, he uses insights from this theory to address a practical question that is of importance to economists and political scientists but also to all citizens with an interest in the political process: which voting method should be used to elect members of Parliament? Professor Maskin will address the problem of whether it is possible to determine whether one method is ‘better’ than another. He argues that although it can be shown that no election method satisfies all the requirements of a reasonable method, one form of election rule comes the closest.
Eric Maskin holds a PhD from Harvard University and has held academic positions at MIT and at Cambridge and Harvard Universities. He currently is Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He lives in Princeton in the house previously occupied by Albert Einstein, and, at Halloween, Professor Maskin has been known to dress up as the great scientist.
Further Information:
Professor Maskin’s webpage: www.sss.ias.edu/community/maskin.php
Nobel Prize website: nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2007/
The following materials have now been made available by Prof. Maskin:
1. a PDF of Professor Maskin's PowerPoint presentation "How Should Members of Parliament (and Presidents) Be Elected."
Click here to download the PDF
2. a PDF of a related Maskin article (with P. Dasgupta) "The Fairest Vote of All," published in Scientific American, 290, (3), 2004.
Click here to download the PDF |
