Rachel E. Kranton

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Prizes in Economics

2012 - Fellow of the Econometric Society

Rachel E. Kranton (born c. 1962) is an American economist and James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Science, Fellow of the Econometric Society, and 2010 recipient of the Blaise Pascal Chair. She was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association from 2015 to 2018. Kranton's research focuses on how social institutions affect economic outcomes, and has applications in a variety of fields within economics, such as economic development, international economics, and industrial organization. More specifically, Kranton studies social networks and develops formal theories of how social networks affect economic behavior, the effects of buyer-seller networks, institutions in colonial India, and reciprocal exchange. By this, she's a major contributor to the emerging new field of economics of networks. She uses formal models of strategic interaction in select economic settings, and draws on these findings through mathematical tools to find how network structures influence economic outcomes. She also focuses on the cost and benefits of networks and informal exchange, which is the economic activity through social relationship. In a long-term collaboration, Kranton and George Akerlof of University of California, Berkeley introduce social identity into formal economic analysis. Akerlof and Kranton recently published a book, Identity Economics, which provides a comprehensive and accessible discussion of their research. In a review for Science, Robert Sugden writes: "Nonspecialist readers will find a lot of insightful and well-informed analysis of how issues of identity affect real economic problems." Bloomberg lists Identity Economics as one of the top 30 business books of 2010. (Source: DBPedia)