About

Daniel Barron is an Associate Professor in the Strategy department at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013. Prior to joining Kellogg, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University. His research interests include contract theory and organizational economics, with a focus on how firms and organizations build and sustain collaborative relationships. His academic positions include visiting professorship at Harvard University and roles at Northwestern University, where he has been an Assistant and then Associate Professor. His work has earned several awards, including the Excellence in Refereeing for the Economic Journal and the Kellogg Faculty Impact Award. His research and teaching emphasize the dynamics of organizational practices, incentive provision, and strategic analysis within firms and industries.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Finance
• Computer Security
• Business
• Political Science
• Microeconomics
• Mathematics
• Monetary economics
• Public relations
• Macroeconomics
• Labour economics
• Law and economics
• Mathematical economics
• Law
• Internet privacy

Selected publications

• Bridging the Gap: Aligning Patient and Provider Priorities in Proms Implementation for Spine and Pain Care

  Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation · 2026-05-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Atlas-Free Functional Brain Connectome Analysis Via Task-Driven Parcellation

  2026-04-08

  article

  Functional brain connectome analysis models brain connectivity as a network, where nodes represent brain regions and edges capture their functional interactions. Existing methods mainly rely on predefined atlases (e.g., AAL) to partition the brain and extract regional signals. However, these predefined atlases lack task specificity and cannot capture individual variability, limiting their effectiveness in clinical prediction. To address these challenges, we propose AFCON, an atlas-free framework that jointly optimizes brain parcellation and connectome analysis in a task-driven manner. AFCON adaptively generates individualized, task-specific parcellations directly from fMRI data, ensuring better alignment with downstream predictions and offering enhanced interpretability. Moreover, we introduce two neurobiologically informed regularizers to ensure plausible parcellations: a spatial compactness regularizer to promote anatomical coherence, and a balanced distribution regularizer to mitigate extreme parcel size imbalances. Experiments on ADHD and ADNI datasets show that AFCON achieves robust predictions, and importantly, identifies disease-relevant brain regions that reveal disrupted functional connections, improving both interpretability and clinical relevance. The code is available at https://github.com/LearningKeqi/AFCON.

  PublisherDOI

• Wealth Dynamics in Communities

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Finance

  Abstract This article develops a model to explore how favour exchange influences wealth dynamics. We identify a key obstacle to wealth accumulation: wealth crowds out favour exchange. Therefore, households must choose between growing their wealth and accessing favour exchange. We show that low-wealth households rely on favour exchange at the cost of having tightly limited long-term wealth. As a result, initial wealth disparities persist and can even grow worse. We then explore how communities and policymakers can overcome this obstacle. Using simulations, we show that community benefits and place-based policies can stimulate both saving and favour exchange, and in some cases, can even transform favour exchange into a force that accelerates wealth accumulation.

  PublisherDOI

• Morale and Debt Dynamics

  Management Science · 2021 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Economics

  This paper shows that debt undermines relational incentives and harms worker morale. We build a dynamic model of a manager who uses limited financial resources to simultaneously repay a creditor and motivate a worker. If the manager can divert or misuse revenue, then debt makes the manager less willing to follow through on promised rewards, leading to low worker effort. In profit-maximizing equilibria, the firm prioritizes repaying its debts, leading to gradual increases in effort and wages. These dynamics can persist even after debts have been fully repaid. Consistent with this analysis, we document that a firm’s financial leverage is negatively related to measures of employee morale, wages, and productivity. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.

  PublisherDOI

• Optimal contracts with a risk‐taking agent

  Theoretical Economics · 2020 · 32 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Microeconomics
  • Computer Science

  Consider an agent who can costlessly add mean‐preserving noise to his output. To deter such risk‐taking, the principal optimally offers a contract that makes the agent's utility concave in output. If the agent is risk‐neutral and protected by limited liability, this concavity constraint binds and so linear contracts maximize profit. If the agent is risk averse, the concavity constraint might bind for some outputs but not others. We characterize the unique profit‐maximizing contract and show how deterring risk‐taking affects the insurance‐incentive trade‐off. Our logic extends to costly risk‐taking and to dynamic settings where the agent can shift output over time.

  PublisherDOI

• The Use and Misuse of Coordinated Punishments*

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2020 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  Abstract Communication facilitates cooperation by ensuring that deviators are collectively punished. We explore how players might misuse communication to threaten one another, and we identify ways that organizations can deter misuse and restore cooperation. In our model, a principal plays trust games with a sequence of short-run agents who communicate with each other. An agent can shirk and then extort pay by threatening to report that the principal deviated. We show that these threats can completely undermine cooperation. Investigations of agents’ efforts, or dyadic relationships between the principal and each agent, can deter extortion and restore some cooperation. Investigations of the principal’s action, on the other hand, typically do not help. Our analysis suggests that collective punishments are vulnerable to misuse unless they are designed with an eye toward discouraging it.

  PublisherDOI

• Policies in Relational Contracts

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2019-04-29 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We consider how a firm’s policies constrain its relational contracts. A policy is a sequence of decisions made by a principal; each decision determines how agents’ efforts affect their outputs. We consider surplus-maximizing policies in a flexible dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and several agents with unrestricted vertical transfers and no commitment. If agents cannot coordinate to punish the principal following a deviation, then the principal might optimally implement dynamically inefficient, history-dependent policies to credibly reward high-performing agents. We develop conditions under which such backward-looking policies are surplus-maximizing and illustrate how they influence promotions, hiring, and performance. (JEL D21, D82, D86, M51)

  PublisherDOI

• Relational Adaptation Under Reel Authority

  Management Science · 2019-11-15 · 25 citations

  article1st author

  We study relationships between parties who have different preferences about how to tailor decisions to changing circumstances. Our model suggests that relational contracts supported by formal contracts may achieve relational adaptation that improves on adaptation decisions achieved by formal or relational contracts alone. Our empirics consider revenue-sharing contracts between movie distributors and an exhibitor. The exhibitor has discretion about whether and when to show a movie, and the parties frequently renegotiate formal contracts after a movie has finished its run. We document that such ex post renegotiation is consistent with the distributor rewarding the exhibitor for adaptation decisions that improve their joint payoffs. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.

  PublisherDOI

• Relational Adaptation Under Reel Authority

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Attaining efficiency with imperfect public monitoring and one-sided Markov adverse selection

  Theoretical Economics · 2017-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I prove an efficiency result for repeated games with imperfect public monitoring in which one player's utility is privately known and evolves according to a Markov process. Under certain assumptions, patient players can attain approximately efficient payoffs in equilibrium. The public signal must satisfy a “pairwise full rank” condition that is somewhat stronger than the monitoring condition required in the folk theorem proved by Fudenberg et al.., 1994. Under stronger assumptions, the efficiency result partially extends to settings in which one player has private information that determines every player's payoff. The proof is partially constructive and uses an intuitive technique to mitigate the impact of private information on continuation payoffs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jeroen M. Swinkels

  7 shared

• Robert Gibbons

  3 shared

• Ricard Gil

  EAE Business School

  2 shared

• Michael Powell

  2 shared

• Yingni Guo

  2 shared

• K. J. Murphy

  1 shared

• Jin Li

  Fudan University

  1 shared

• Bryony Reich

  Kellogg's (Canada)

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Kellogg Faculty Impact Award (STRT-431)
• Excellence in Refereeing for the Economic Journal Chairs' Co…
• AER: Insights Excellence in Refereeing Award, American Econo…
• ThReD Associate, Theoretical Research in Development Economi…
• CESifo Prize in Applied Microeconomics - Distinguished CESif…