CIRANO congratulates Bengt Holmstrom, the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science (with Oliver Hart) for his contributions in the Theory of Contracts. Bengt Holmstrom (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was an influential member of the first Scientific Evaluation Committee of CIRANO in 1997. Other members were: Richard Kihlstrom (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), president of the committee, Raphael Amit (University of British Columbia), Morley Gunderson (Universityof Toronto), Pierre-André Julien (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières), et Luc Soete (University of Maastricht).

The Committee wrote in its report: "CIRANO has made impressive progress toward achieving its goals in a short period. With strong management it has created a high quality research team and put in place a framework for successful interaction between its academic researchers and its business and governmental partners. As a result CIRANO has achieved some important successes in the form of projects that grew out of the needs of its partners. The questions raised by the partners were translated into interesting research projects by the academics and the results have been of use to the partners. There is no doubt that such cooperation would have not been achieved by researchers working in the typical university environment and without the benefit of the framework that CIRANO offers. We believe that CIRANO’s creation was vital in enabling this kind of research program and the resulting high quality outputs. Although the largest research teams were assembled and the most impressive of examples of successful academic-practitioner cooperation were achieved in the Human Resources and Contracts programs, the other programs have achieved more limited success with smaller but nevertheless excellent research teams. One of CIRANO’s challenges for the future is to expand its strength and success in Finance and Innovation while maintaining its strength in the Human Resources and Contracts programs. Another challenge is to successfully manage its relationship with the universities.".

Among the contributions of Bengt Holmstrom, we may mention "On the Theory of Delegation", published in Bayesian Models in Economic Theory (Marcel Boyer and Richard Kihlstrom eds., North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1984).