The 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".
In economics, mechanism design is the art of designing rules of a game to achieve a specific outcome.
Mechanism designers commonly try to achieve the following basic outcomes:
*** truthfulness, individual rationality, budget balance, and social welfare.
*** More advanced mechanisms attempt to resist harmful coalitions of players.
