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PRESS RELEASE
PRESS OFFICE
At the award presentation, to take place today in the BBVA Foundation
headquarters, Roberts will give a lecture titled ‘In Praise of Weak Incentives’,
to be subsequently published by Cambridge University Press
Economist John Roberts, professor at
Stanford University, awarded the
IESE-Fundación BBVA Prize

The award honors Roberts for a career that successfully spans
economic theory, management strategy and consulting on
regulatory issues for government departments and agencies
October 21, 2009.- Economist John Roberts, a professor at Stanford
University, has won this year’s edition of the ‘Economics for Management
Lecture Series IESE-Fundación BBVA Prize’. Donald John Roberts, now resident
in the United States, was born in Winnipeg (Canada) in 1945 and received his
doctorate in economics in 1972 from the University of Minnesota. In 1980, he
joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he currently holds the John H.
Scully Professorship in Economics, Strategic Management and International
Business in the Graduate School of Business (GSB). He is also faculty director
of the Global Management Program and director of the Center for Global
Business and the Economy at this same center.
The jury deciding the award cited Roberts’ role as a bridge between the worlds
of economic theory and business management, alongside his public policy
experience as an advisor to the United States Government between 1979 and
1982. He has also acted as consultant for major corporations like British
Petroleum, Shell, Merck and Deutsche Telekom.
In 2004, Roberts published ‘The Modern Firm’ exploring the links between
organizational design features, competitive strategy and the business
environment. This publication, selected by The Economist as best business
book of the year, draws on examples ranging from the fur trading companies
of the eighteenth century to modern-day names like Dupont, General Motors,
BP or Nokia, focusing on how they have coped with the increase in global
competition and changes in technology. Roberts is also author of more than
seventy scholarly articles as well as innovative practical guides like ‘Economics,
Organization and Management’, applying incentive and contract theories to the
problems of management.
Professor Roberts has pioneered the application of economic theory and games
theory to problems of economics and management, to the study of industrial
competition (especially in the presence of information asymmetry among
market agents) and to the economics of organizations. In recent years his
research has focused on organizational design, governance and management
and how to achieve the best fit between strategy and structure, with particular
reference to multinational corporations.
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has served on the
editorial boards of various influential journals from The American Economic
Review to The Journal of Economics Management and Strategy by way of
Econometrica, and has acted as advisor to leading companies and the United
States Government.
LECTURE
The presentation of the ‘Economics for Management Lecture Series IESEFundación BBVA Prize’ will take place on Wednesday October 21 at 19.30 in
the Madrid offices of the BBVA Foundation. After receiving his award, Professor
Roberts will deliver a lecture titled ‘In Praise of Weak Incentives’, in which he
will discuss the recent wave of attacks on the incentive systems employed by
U.S. and British investment banks. These critiques are not just that the
bankers got too much pay, but that their pay systems encouraged too much
risk-taking. In fact, economic theory identifies a number of circumstances
where the link between measured performance and rewards should ideally be
very weak.
This talk will highlight several of these circumstances and analyze the
underlying logic, which squares perfectly well with the conditions of the
banking industry in recent years. Thus the theory indicates that the strong
incentives put in place were not only inappropriate and badly designed but also
played a crucial role in generating the global financial crisis. Subsequently, the
lecture will be published by Cambridge University Press under a dedicated
publishing line: the Economics for Management Lecture Series.
IESE- FUNDACIÓN BBVA PRIZE
Last year’s ‘Economics for Management Lecture Series IESE–Fundación BBVA
Prize’ was granted to Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor in the Strategic
Management Department at IESE Business School, in recognition of his
research work in economics and salient contributions in the international
business sphere. The year before, the inaugural prize went to Carl Shapiro,
professor in the Haas Business School of the University of California at
Berkeley.
For more information please contact the BBVA Foundation Press Office
(+34 91 374 52 10 / +34 94 487 46 27)
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