No letup for Nobel winner
So you’ve won a Nobel Memorial Prize — what do you do next? For Professor Oliver Hart, who with MIT colleague Bengt Holmström won this year’s economics Nobel for contributions to contract theory, the answer lies in new research on an old question — what should the goals of a public company be? Many scholars subscribe to famed economist Milton Friedman’s argument that companies should concern themselves only with profits and allow shareholders to make up their own minds on which causes to support with dividends. But in a new paper, which was just completed on Friday, Hart and colleagues challenge that idea. “What Friedman said is firms should act on behalf of shareholders,” Hart says. “They want to make as much money from the firm as possible, and they may be nice people, so they can spend that money in nice ways.” View all posts in Campus & Community Explore: Harvard’s Oliver Hart wins...