Greg Mankiw and Tyler Cowen have started the speculation. Cowen prefers “Anne Krueger, Jagdish Bhagwati, and Gordon Tullock for their work on rent-seeking” but predicts a behavioral finance prize to Fama, Thaler & French or a prize for research on the principal-agent theory of the firm to Williamson and/or Tirole. Mankiw predicts Fama, Feldstein, or Barro based on some citation analysis. Thomson Scientific adds their own predictions here.
I should note that I’m not very good at this Nobel prediction game. Last year I incorrectly predicted that Fama, Thaler & French would win the prize and ended up losing a very expensive and tasty dinner bet to Geoff. While those were my predictions, I made the case that the prize should go to either Tullock (rent-seeking) or jointly to Alchian, Demsetz and Klein (theory of the firm, property rights, transaction costs economics — can we just call this contributions to industrial organization?). Its a new year. But I don’t see why my picks should change this year. I haven’t learned anything between then and now about how these things work, and my views on the economists certainly haven’t changed. So here goes:
- Prediction: Fama, Thaler and French.
- Preference: A prize to the UCLA group of Alchian, Demsetz and Klein or my colleague Gordon Tullock.
Geoff: Want to take advantage of my stubbornness and take the field again against a group including Fama, Thaler, Williamson, Holmstrom, and Barro?