SIOE is delighted to announce the winners of its 2026 awards, presented at the 30th Annual Conference at INSEAD, Fontainebleau. Three prizes were awarded this year: the Douglass North Best Book Award, the Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award, and the Oliver E. Williamson Best Conference Paper Award. Our congratulations to the winners, and our thanks to the award committees for their careful work.
The Douglass North Best Book Award goes to Angela Zhang (USC Law) for High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs its Economy. Against the familiar picture of a government controlling the economy with an iron fist, High Wire shows how decentralised decision-making shapes the way Chinese firms and regulators act and react — formal rules often do not drive organizational incentives, and both firms and officials experiment within the boundaries institutions set. The committee also recognised two runners-up: Jenny Guardado (Georgetown SFS) for The Venal Origins of Development in Spanish America, and Martin J. Williams (University of Michigan) for Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies.
The Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award goes to Matteo Tranchero (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) for “The Role of Data in the Search for Innovation: Essays on Big Data Genomics” (UC Berkeley Haas, 2024). The dissertation asks when big data helps or hinders innovation, and answers it in three coherent chapters — on misallocation toward false positives in genome-wide association studies, on domain knowledge being amplified rather than displaced by data, and on a “streetlight effect” in which attractive but suboptimal data narrows exploration and suppresses breakthrough discovery. The committee also wishes to recognise the two other finalists, Deivy Houeix (MIT) and Sukrit Singh Puri (MIT), whose dissertations made the selection genuinely difficult.
The Oliver E. Williamson Best Conference Paper Award goes to “How Market Access Shapes Wellbeing and Values: Experimental Evidence from the D.R. Congo”, by Marina Ngoma, Clara Sievert, Xavier Jaravel, Nathan Nunn and Jonathan L. Weigel, selected unanimously by the committee. A field experiment across 300 villages near Kananga gave randomly selected households free weekly transport to the city’s markets for six months. Nine months on, participants’ household income was 16% higher — yet they were not better off by their own reckoning, with depression rising by 5.6 percentage points, and values shifting away from religion and toward hard work, thrift and personal agency. Markets, the paper concludes, are not value-neutral: they reshape what the people who use them want and believe.
The full citations, the runners-up and finalists, and the composition of each committee are available on the 2026 SIOE Awards page.