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Organizational Economics and Management Education

Robert S. Gibbons: June 7, 2003; Running Time: 49:35

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In less than an hour, Robert Gibbons not only gets through 200 years of economic history, but outlines a new curriculum in organizational research planned by the Sloan School. Gibbons recounts some classic business stories – for instance, how Birds Eye’s success with frozen peas made the frozen food market “thick,” opening it up to scores of smaller players. Management students must master the basics of economics, says Gibbons, but Sloan must also help them train their sights on the current economy. The planned course offerings will knit together such traditional studies as economic theory, markets and competition with the latest in the fields of corporate governance and culture, technology and innovation.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

About the Speaker

Robert S. Gibbons

Sloan Distinguished Professor of Organizational Economics and Strategy
MIT Sloan School of Management and Department of Economics

Robert Gibbons’ field is organizational design and performance. He specializes in the idea of relational, or unwritten contracts, which frequently arise between allied firms. His book Game Theory for Applied Economists (Princeton University Press, 1992) is widely used in graduate economic programs and has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. His scholarly papers include “Cheap Talk Can Matter in Bargaining,” “Layoffs and Lemons” and the forthcoming “Team Theory, Garbage Cans, and Real Organizations: Some History and Prospects of Economic Research on Decision-Making in Organizations.” Gibbons received a B.A. from Harvard, the M. Phil. from Cambridge University, and the Ph.D. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Robert S. Gibbons

MIT Sloan

Gibbons at Sloan

About the Host

About the Host

MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the world’s leading business schools — conducting cutting-edge research and providing management education to top students from more than 60 countries. The School is part of MIT’s rich intellectual tradition of education and research.

MIT Sloan began in 1914 as engineering administration curriculum in the MIT Department of Economics and Statistics. The scope and depth of this educational focus have grown steadily in response to advances in the theory and practice of management to today’s broad-based management school.

A program offering a master’s degree in management was established in 1925. The world’s first university-based executive education program — the MIT Sloan Fellows — was created in 1931 under the sponsorship of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., an 1895 MIT graduate who was then chairman of General Motors. A MIT Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with a charge of educating the “ideal manager.”