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Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson delivers 33rd BSE Lecture
In his lecture, Prof. Roger Myerson explored the benefits of democratic decentralization, which he called "underappreciated," and contrasted them with a national leader's incentives for centralizing government control. He also outlined mechanisms for holding local authorities accountable to voters.
In the conclusion of his lecture, Professor Myerson used the example of the United States to illustrate how a decentralized model can form the foundations of economic prosperity.
"Founders of the USA had to accept substantial decentralization of power in their new nation because autonomous local governments had been established first...Since then, democratic local governments in America have overseen local public investments that provided the basic framework for building the richest nation on earth." - Roger Myerson, BSE Lecture
About Roger Myerson
Roger Myerson is the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He has made seminal contributions to the fields of economics and political science. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in recognition of his contributions to mechanism design theory, which analyzes rules for coordinating economic agents efficiently when they have different information and difficulty trusting each other. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
