The Invisible Helping Hand

Canice Prendergast is an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He works in the language of dense mathematical models that aim to clarify why, for example, service at airport security is so dismal and why that might actually be a good thing. (Because a few of the Department of Homeland Security’s “customers” may be bomb-carrying terrorists, it’s not exactly a customer-is-always-right setting.) He’s a serious enough art collector that when Booth built a $125 million campus across the way from Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Robie House, Prendergast was put in charge of a million-dollar budget for decorating its hallways. Instead of the usual array of bland landscapes and oil paintings of old white men in suits that populate the walls of many business schools, Booth’s walls are filled with abstract, conceptual works that challenge and often mystify its faculty and students.  More