March-ing toward organizational economics

Abstract

Abstract I was a student of Jim March’s in 1983, meaning that I took a mandatory 10-week doctoral class on organization theory from him that changed my life. And I have been a student of Jim’s ever since, meaning that I have tried to keep learning from Jim’s ideas—about organizations and about life. During the course and for over a decade afterwards, most of my academic learning from Jim was about how disciplines other than economics think about organizations. More recently, I have tried to discern how the roots of my own field, organizational economics, often involve Jim. This note focuses on the latter, especially informed by precious summer discussions from 2013 to 2018.1