Robert Gibbons is Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and professor in MIT’s Department of Economics. His research and teaching concern the design and performance of organized activities, especially “relational contracts” (informal agreements so rooted in the parties’ circumstances that they cannot be adjudicated by courts). Organized activities may occur within firms, between firms (e.g., supply relationships, alliances, joint ventures), or beyond firms (e.g., hospitals, schools, government agencies). He has won teaching awards in both the Sloan School and the Economics Department.
Since 2002, Gibbons has been a co-principal investigator of MIT Sloan’s Program on Innovation in Markets and Organizations—whose mission is to “Change the world, by changing management, by changing management education, by changing the research that affects management education.”—and (b) founding director of the working group in organizational economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Since 2016, he has co-organized (with Woody Powell) a two-week multi- disciplinary summer institute for young faculty on “Organizations and Their Effectiveness” at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences: participants study various kinds of organizations using different disciplines and methodologies. Since 2018, alumni convocations have integrated participants from prior summers.