These volumes contain the papers of the invited symposium sessions of the Eighth World Congress of the Econometric Society. The meetings were held at the University of Washington, Seattle, in August 2000; we served as Program Co-Chairs. Volume 1 also contains an invited address, the “Seattle Lecture,” given by Eric Maskin. This address was in addition to other named lectures that are typically published in Econometrica. Symposium sessions had discussants, and about half of these wrote up their comments for publication. These remarks are included in the book after the session papers they comment on.

The book chapters explore and interpret recent developments in a variety of areas in economics and econometrics. Although we chose topics and authors to represent the broad interests of members of the Econometric Society, the selected areas were not meant to be exhaustive. We deliberately included some new active areas of research not covered in recent Congresses. For many chapters, we encouraged collaboration among experts in an area. Moreover, some sessions were designed to span the econometrics–theory separation that is sometimes evident in the Econometric Society. We followed the lead of our immediate predecessors, David Kreps and Ken Wallis, by including all of the contributions in a single book edited by the three of us. Because of the number of contributions, we have divided the book into three volumes; the topics are grouped in a manner that seemed appropriate to us.