On Wednesday 30 May 2018 at 4:30pm, in the Aula Absidale di Santa Lucia (Via de' Chiari 25 - Bologna), Oliver Simon D’Arcy Hart, one of the most influential economists of our time, will receive an Honorary PhD in Economics. The ceremony will also include the annual Lectio Magistralis of the Department of Economics, titled: “Does Serving Shareholders Mean Putting Profit Above All Else?”
Hart, the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016 for his work on incomplete contracts and the consequences of such inefficiency on the nature of firms, the functioning of financial markets and the structures of constitutions.
The Alma Mater confers this Honorary PhD in Economics on the British economist for his intellectual qualities and his significant contribution to advances in economic sciences. Prof. Hart’s fundamental insight was to identify incompleteness as the main characteristic of contracts. Starting from that observation, he has provided rigorous theoretical tools to assess both the normative and the positive allocation of control, ownership and decision-making rights within contractual agreements, and how these decisions influence the structure of firms, the regulation of financial markets, and state intervention.