Robert Gibbons

Robert Gibbons is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Gibbons is also the co-principal investigator for the Program on Innovation in Markets and Organizations at MIT Sloan. He studies the design and performance of organizations and contracts, especially “relational contracts”—agreements so rooted in the parties’ particular circumstances that they are not written down, so that disputes cannot be adjudicated by outsiders such as courts. These contracts arise frequently both within firms such as between headquarters and divisions—and between firms such as in alliances.

His book, Game Theory for Applied Economists (Princeton University Press, 1992), has been translated into Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. Gibbons is currently preparing a doctoral text on organizational economics and is co-editing the Handbook of Organizational Economics (with J. Roberts), both forthcoming from Princeton University Press. He served on the board of the Citicorp Behavioral Sciences Research Council for its duration, from 1994 to 2000, and on the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 2000 to 2006.

Gibbons holds an AB in applied mathematics from Harvard University, an MPhil in economics from Cambridge University, and a PhD in decision sciences from Stanford University.