大学英语听力4答案,大学英语听力：两位美国大学教授获得诺贝尔经济学奖

Nobel Prize Winners Studied Agreements Affecting Everyone
Two professors at American universities have won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. They were honored for their work on business agreements that affect billions of people worldwide: contracts.
“The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Richsbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2016 to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom for their contributions to contract theory.”
Goran Hansson, the Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciencesannounced the prize Monday.
Oliver Hart is a professor at Harvard University. Bengt Holmstrom is at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or M.I.T.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the prize was awarded for work on the theory of contracts. These agreements affect almost every part of modern life.
Contracts are everywhere
Insurance, loans, buying agreements, employment, property rights, political constitutions and marriage are all kinds of contracts.
Hart and Holmstrom developed a theory for understanding how contracts work. Their research has been used to design contracts. It relates to contracts in private markets and in public policy.
Contracts are agreements between a principal and an agent. One example of this relationship is the one between an employer and an employee.
The leader of a company and its shareholders also have a contractual agreement.
Hart and Holmstrom’s work raised questions about tying the pay of high-level officials to a company’s current profits. They found that performance-based pay might not be the best policy in some cases. Doing so, may give a business leader anincentive to make decisions that increase profits for a short period of time. Those same decisions may harm the company over the long term.
The two also studied insurance contracts. They argued that people may become careless if insurance companies fully replaced things that are damaged in an accident, such as cars. So, insurance companies often have contract holders pay adeductible toward repair. Insurers also limit what they are willing pay for or replace in many cases.

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