Le CIRANO tient à féliciter Bengt Holmstrom, lauréat 2016 du Prix Nobel de sciences économiques (avec Oliver Hart) pour ses travaux en théorie des contrats. Rappelons que Bengt Holmstrom, professeur au Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a été un membre influent du premier Comité d’évaluation scientifique du CIRANO en 1997. Les autres membres du Comité étaient Richard Kihlstrom (Wharton School, Université de Pennsylvanie), président du comité, Raphael Amit (Université de la Colombie-Britannique), Morley Gunderson (Université de Toronto), Pierre-André Julien (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières), et Luc Soete (Université deMaastricht).

Le Comité d’évaluation scientifique de 1997 écrivit dans son rapport : « 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. ».

Parmi les travaux de Bengt Holmstrom, mentionnons « On the Theory of Delegation », publié dans Bayesian Models in Economic Theory (Marcel Boyer and Richard Kihlstrom eds., North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1984).