Robert S. Gibbons is Sloan Distinguished Professor of Organizational Economics and Strategy MIT Sloan School of Management and Department of Economics.

Robert Gibbons’ field is organizational design and performance. He specializes in the idea of relational, or unwritten contracts, which frequently arise between allied firms. His book Game Theory for Applied Economists (Princeton University Press, 1992) is widely used in graduate economic programs and has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. His scholarly papers include “Cheap Talk Can Matter in Bargaining,” “Layoffs and Lemons” and the forthcoming “Team Theory, Garbage Cans, and Real Organizations: Some History and Prospects of Economic Research on Decision-Making in Organizations.” Gibbons received a B.A. from Harvard, the M. Phil. from Cambridge University, and the Ph.D. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.