Event Details

This year’s Andrews & Brunner Lecture will be delivered by Professor Roger B. Myerson, Nobel Laureate and Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

In his lecture, Local Politics in Nations and Empires, Professor Myerson explores the foundations of political stability through the lens of local leadership, property rights, and state-building. Drawing on themes from his paper Local Politics in Nations and Empires, he examines how the relationship between local communities and national governance has shaped both prosperous democracies and enduring autocratic states.

He argues that a state’s long-term success depends on maintaining trust between national leaders and locally rooted elites — a dynamic that remains central to political and economic development today.

About the Speaker

Roger Myerson is the Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and a 2007 Nobel laureate in economics. Myerson has made pathbreaking contributions to the field of mechanism design — often described as the engineering branch of economics — which studies how to construct social and economic mechanisms that lead to desirable collective outcomes despite individuals’ self-interested behaviour. His pioneering work has yielded fundamental results and insights on mechanisms that induce truthful reporting of preferences in auctions, procurements, and other trading environments, thereby achieving efficient market outcomes. Myerson has also made ground breaking contributions to political economy and cooperative game theory.