The Nobel Prize in Economics was given yesterday to two wonderful theorists, Bengt Holmstrom and Oliver Hart. I wrote a day ago about Holmstrom’s contributions, many of which are simply foundational to modern mechanism design and its applications. Oliver Hart’s contribution is more subtle and hence more of a challenge to describe to a nonspecialist; I am sure of this because no concept gives my undergraduate students more headaches than Hart’s “residual control right” theory of the firm. Even stranger, much of Hart’s recent work repudiates the importance of his most famous articles, a point that appears to have been entirely lost on every newspaper discussion of Hart that I’ve seen (including otherwise very nice discussions like Applebaum’s in the New York Times). A major reason he has changed his beliefs, and his research agenda, so radically is not simply the whims of age or the pressures of politics, but…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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