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Roberts Elected to Academy of Arts and Sciences

April 2005

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Economist John Roberts has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 15th current member of the Business School faculty inducted into the international learned society founded in 1780.

Roberts, the John H. Scully Professor of Economics, Strategic Management, and International Business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, was nominated and elected by current members of the Academy. He currently is the School's senior associate dean for external relations, codirector of the Center for Global Business and the Economy, and director of the Global Management Program within the MBA Program. Also elected to the Academy as a foreign honorary member was Paul Klemperer, MBA '82, PhD '87, the Edgeworth Professor of Economics at University of Oxford.

The Academy is an international learned society composed of the world's leading scientists, scholars, artists, business people, and public leaders. This year's new fellows also include Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado; Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist; Steven Squyres, leader of NASA's Rover program for the exploration of Mars; Academy Award-winning actor and director Sidney Poitier; Washington Post Co. CEO Donald Graham, SEP '83; Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page; architect, sculptor, and designer of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, Maya Lin; as well as four Pulitzer Prize winners-dramatist Horton Foote, playwright Tony Kushner, novelist Alison Lurie, and cartoonist Art Spiegelman.

"It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding leaders in their fields in this, the Academy's 225th year," said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. "Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large."

"Throughout its history, the Academy has convened the leading thinkers of the day, from diverse perspectives, to participate in projects and studies that advance the public good," added Executive Officer Leslie Berlowitz.

The Academy, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., brings together fellows to conduct studies on significant contemporary issues. Its four major program areas are:

  • Science and global security: Work explores how the international community can create new cooperative structures to improve global security and employ science and technology to enhance the human condition.
  • Social policy and American institutions: Fellows carry out studies focused on American institutions at the crossroads-particularly government and the corporation.
  • Humanities and culture: Work enhances public understanding of the value and role of the humanities in American life and creates new resources to inform coherent policy analyses relative to the humanities.
  • Education: Fellows explore education at all levels from primary education to teaching and research at the university level.

Roberts is the author of The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth (Oxford University Press, 2004). The book has been named the best business book of 2005 by the Economist.

His teaching and research involve the application of economic and strategic (game-theoretic) analysis to management problems. Work centers on the design, governance, and management of organizations and with the fit between strategy and structure, with special reference to multinational businesses. This is also the subject of Roberts' current MBA, executive, and doctoral teaching at Stanford.

In 1997 Roberts gave the inaugural Clarendon Lecture in Management Studies at Oxford and in 2000 he was the Minnesota Lecturer at the Department of Economics of the University of Minnesota. He received the Silver Apple award from the Business School's Alumni Association in 2000, and in 2002 was honored with the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Stanford Sloan Master's Program. He is this year's recipient of the Robert T. Davis Award, presented annually by the School's faculty to recognize extraordinary contributions of a colleague.

Other Stanford Business School faculty who are members of the Academy are Jonathan Bendor, David Brady, Jeremy Bulow, Alain Enthoven, Michael Hannan, Keith Krehbiel, David Kreps, Edward Lazear, James March, William Miller, Paul Romer, George Shultz, Michael Spence, and Robert Wilson.