Roger B. Myerson (born March 29, 1951,Boston, Mass., U.S.) is an American economist who shared, withLeonid Hurwicz andEric S. Maskin, the 2007Nobel Prize for Economics for his work onmechanism design theory.

Myerson earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied mathematics fromHarvard University in 1973. In 1976 he was awarded a doctorate from Harvard; in his thesis he examined cooperative games, a subject he explored further in his landmark 1981 paper on optimal auction design. In 1976 he took a post in theeconomics department atNorthwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He remained there until 2001, when he accepted a position at theUniversity of Chicago.

At its most basic, mechanism design theory tries to simulate market conditions in such a way as to maximize gains for all parties. As buyers and sellers within a market rarely know one another’s motives or ambitions, resources may be lost or misallocated because of information asymmetry. Myerson addressed this problem by proposing the revelation principle, wherein buyers are offered an incentive for truthfully reporting what they would pay for goods or services.