Eric Stark Maskin (born December 12, 1950) is an American economist and Nobel laureate recognized with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." He is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Until 2011, he was the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a visiting lecturer with the rank of Professor at Princeton University.

Maskin was born in New York City, New York on December 12, 1950, to a non-religious Jewish family, and grew up in Alpine, New Jersey. He graduated from Tenafly High School in Tenafly, New Jersey in 1968, and attended Harvard University where he received his A.B. in mathematics and Ph.D. in applied mathematics. After he earned his doctorate, Maskin went to the University of Cambridge in 1976 where he was a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. He taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1977–1984 and from 1985-2000 at Harvard University, where he was the Louis Berkman Professor of Economics. In 2000, he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Peter David Schiff (pronounced /ˈʃɪf/; born March 23, 1963) is an American businessman, investment broker, author and financial commentator. Schiff is CEO and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital Inc., a broker-dealer based in Westport, Connecticut and CEO of Euro Pacific Precious Metals, LLC, a gold and silver dealer based in New York City.

Schiff frequently appears as a guest on financial television and is often quoted in major financial publications. He is host of The Peter Schiff Show, a radio show broadcast on terrestrial and internet radio. He is a frequent guest on internet radio as well as the host of the former podcast Wall Street Unspun. In 2010 Schiff ran as a candidate in the Republican primary for the United States Senate seat from Connecticut.

Schiff is known for his bearish views on the dollar and dollar denominated assets, while bullish on investment in tangible assets as well as foreign stocks and currencies.

Peter Schiff was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Irwin Schiff, is a prominent figure in the U.S. tax protester movement, currently serving a 13-year sentence for tax evasion. Peter Schiff attended Beverly Hills High School in California, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 with a Bachelor's degree in finance and accounting.

Jean Marcel Tirole (born August 9, 1953) is a French professor of economics. He works on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and economics and psychology. Tirole is director of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Foundation at the Toulouse School of Economics, and scientific director of the Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI) in Toulouse. After receiving his PhD from MIT in 1981, he worked as a researcher at l'École nationale des ponts et chaussées until 1984. From 1984-1991 he worked as a Professor of Economics at MIT. He was president of the Econometric Society in 1998 and of the European Economic Association in 2001. He is still affiliated with MIT, where he holds a visiting position.

Tirole received engineering degrees from the École Polytechnique in Paris in 1976, and from École nationale des ponts et chaussées, Paris (1978) and a "Doctorat de 3ème cycle" in decision mathematics from the Paris Dauphine University (1978). In 1981 he received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Leonid "Leo" Hurwicz (Russian: Леони́д Гу́рвич; August 21, 1917 – June 24, 2008) was a Russian-born American economist. His nationality of origin was Polish. He was Jewish. He originated incentive compatibility and mechanism design, which show how desired outcomes are achieved in economics, social science and political science. Interactions of individuals and institutions, markets and trade are analyzed and understood today using the models Hurwicz developed. To date, Leonid Hurwicz is the oldest Nobel Laureate, having received the prize at the age of 90.

Hurwicz was Regents' Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Minnesota. He was among the first economists to recognize the value of game theory and was a pioneer in its application. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for their work on mechanism design.

Hurwicz was born in Moscow, Russia, to a Jewish family a few months before the October Revolution. The family had originated in Poland and had lived in Congress Poland (the part of Poland then within the Russian Empire) but had been displaced by World War I. Soon after Leonid's birth, the family returned to Warsaw, Poland. Hurwicz and his family experienced persecution by both the Bolsheviks and Nazis, as he again became a refugee when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. His parents and brother fled Warsaw, only to be arrested and sent to Soviet labor camps. Hurwicz, who had graduated from Warsaw University in 1938, at the time of Nazi invasion on Poland was in London, moved to Switzerland then to Portugal and finally in 1940 he emigrated to the United States. His family eventually joined him there.