New Economics Professor is expert on motivating

Professor James Malcomson, Professor of Economics at the University of Southampton since 1985, has been appointed to a newly-established Chair of Economics. He will become a Fellow of All Souls College when he takes up his post in January 1999. The appointment is in the first instance to compensate for the temporary loss of Professor John Vickers, seconded to the Bank of England as Chief Economist for three years from last June, but continues for the duration of Professor Malcomson's Oxford career. By the summer of 1999, it is expected that the Sub-faculty of Economics will have absorbed the present Institute of Economics and Statistics and become a department in its own right, housed in Phase I of its own building at St Cross, the first Oxford project to be designed by the architect Sir Norman Foster. Professor Malcomson (pictured left) has written and researched widely on the subject of investment in capital equipment and the economics of contracts, especially for employment and for the provision of health services. He is particularly interested in the ways employers motivate employees, through performance-related pay and other alternatives where performance cannot be readily measured. He has investigated bonuses and competition for promotion as alternatives to formal performance-related pay, with a number of co-researchers. In the area of health services, Professor Malcomson has been investigating how health authorities can best frame contracts, again given that many functions of health trusts are not susceptible to measurement. The Economic and Social Research Council is presently funding his research (jointly with Martin Chalkley) into this area, including funding arrangements for General Practitioners. Professor Malcomson graduated in Economics from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1967. He became a Teaching Fellow at Harvard in 1969, researching the utilisation and obsolescence of capital equipment and gaining a Ph.D. in 1973. From 1971 until 1985 he became research fellow, lecturer, and senior lecturer at the University of York, where his investigations into the capital side of production led him to the conviction that economists needed to develop a better understanding of the employment side.