XVIII Edition of the Trento Summer School in Adaptive Economic Dynamics – University of Trento, Italy, on 5-17 June 2017.

This year’s school, organised by Margaret Blair (Vanderbilt University Law School, USA), Nicolai Foss (Bocconi University, Italy) and Anna Grandori (Bocconi University, Italy), will focus on “New Thinking on the Firm: Bringing Together Law, Economics, Organization and History”.

Aims and Scope

The financial crisis has accelerated the debate on the nature and working of institutions that rule the functioning of markets. However, a number of arguments also trace the crisis to firm organization.

There is therefore a need for an approach that links both the institutional level and the players regulated by institutions.

Nevertheless both the theory of the firm and the legal debate, are adapting slowly and seem to employ concepts better fit to the economic environment and the industrial enterprises of the past century, rather than animated by efforts at rethinking the nature of the firm itself as fundamental institution of modern knowledge-intensive economies and democratic societies.

A major concern of the school is therefore to re-open a debate on the nature of the firm, complementing economic theory with organizational, historical and juridical perspectives; building on and promoting dialogue among research perspectives that are already interdisciplinary and have already taken steps in that direction, such as ‘New Institutional Economics, ‘Law, Economics & Organization’, ‘Organization and Management Theory’, ‘Business History’, ‘Evolutionary economics’, and ‘Economic sociology’.

The program has been designed, and the faculty constituted, so as to build on contributions highlighting different responses to some key issues, organized in four main teaching modules.

Lecturers

Avner Ben-Ner, University of Minnesota

Margaret Blair, Vanderbilt University Law School

Nicolai Foss, Bocconi University

Robert Gibbons, MIT, Sloan BS

Anna Grandori, Bocconi University

Thomas Kochan, MIT, Sloan BS

Siegwart Lindenberg, University of Groningen

Scott Masten, University of Michigan

Colin Mayer, University of Oxford, Said BS

Renate Meyer, University of Vienna

Lorenzo Sacconi, University of Trento

More information can be found in the attachment below.

sc-prog-2016web-1