Symposium on Free Market Solutions to Urban Grand Challenges
Urban grand challenges are systemic and interrelated problems that affect cities and require multidisciplinary solutions. Among these problems are violent crime, child hunger, adult obesity, substance abuse, educational underachievement, housing blight, and communicable disease.
Accepted abstracts were invited for full paper submissions to the Academy of Management Perspectives, Journal of Technology Transfer, or Small Business Economics, as appropriate to the mission of each journal. Abstracts were no more than 250 words.
Symposium participants will be responsible for their own travel costs, and there was a $50 registration fee for the conference and meals.
In addition, the organizers conducted a PhD students’ consortium before the symposium to mentor doctoral students and discuss their research on free markets and urban grand challenges. Selection into the consortium was made by a committee of senior faculty. We invited faculty to nominate their graduate students to participate in the consortium. PhD candidates submitted a 70-word abstract of their research idea. Invited candidates received a $1,000 stipend to cover travel and accommodation costs.
The Symposium on Free Market Solutions to Urban Grand Challenges was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and the Charles Koch Foundation. It included participation from experts in medicine, public health, nursing, education, sociology, and free enterprise from across the U.S.