Robert Gibbons

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). Since 2002, Gibbons has been co-principal investigator of MIT Sloan’s Program on Innovation in Markets and Organizations. He was founding director of the working group in organizational economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research (2002-22), co-editor (with John Roberts) of The Handbook of Organizational Economics (Princeton University Press) and a board member of the Citicorp Behavioral Science Research Council (1994-2000) and of CASBS (2000-06). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During 2016-19 and 2023-24, Gibbons and Woody Powell (Stanford University) co-ran summer institutes at CASBS for assistant professors studying organizations from multiple disciplines and using many methodologies. During Covid, they held virtual convocations integrating the existing cohorts of summer scholars; before and after the pandemic there have been in-person events integrating the cohorts.  Gibbons is a research affiliate, and was a CASBS fellow in 1994-95 and 2014-15.