A student of public policy needs to understand at least two different kinds of organization: those that are target of policy, like firms or unions, and those that make policy, like legislatures or administrative agencies. This course will use the economic theory of contracts to provide a unified view of this diversity of forms these different organizations take, and of how they respond to changes in the environments that they face. Although the focus will be on economic approaches, we will also look at perspectives from psychology and sociology with an eye toward identifying complementarities between the approaches.
