Who are you looking for?

Install Famoose

Keep Famoose on your home screen or desktop for easy access.

Open this site in Chrome or Edge and look for Install app in the browser menu or address bar. If no install option appears, you can bookmark Famoose instead.

Famoose.co
Appearance
Text size
Page width
Colour
Discover›Business
Contents
Oliver Hart
Economist

Oliver Hart

Famoose for

Explaining ownership and incomplete contracts

Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure · Incomplete contracts

Born
9 October 1948
Birthplace
London

More people

Mark ZuckerbergCo-founding Facebook.John Maynard KeynesExplaining how weak spending can keep an economy in a slump.Steve JobsCo-founding Apple and leading the launch of the iPhone.

Oliver Hart

Oliver Hart studies how firms organise control when contracts cannot cover every possible future event. His work helped develop economic accounts of ownership, incentives and corporate boundaries.

Early life

Mathematics to economics

Studied mathematics at Cambridge, economics at Warwick and completed a Princeton doctorate in 1974.

Career

  1. 1984

    MIT

    Returned to the United States to teach.

  2. 1993

    Harvard

    Joined its faculty.

  3. 2016

    Economics prize

    Shared the Nobel Memorial Prize with Bengt Holmström.

Selected work

Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure

Presented work on corporate organisation.

Incomplete contracts

Explained why control rights matter when agreements leave contingencies unspecified.

Beyond work

Family

Married literature scholar Rita Goldberg; they have two sons.

Sources & photo creditBiography and career ↗Biographical references ↗Additional biographical or achievement source ↗

Original photograph. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.

Photo: Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden. CC BY 2.0 · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.