An interdisciplinary team of Dartmouth researchers has received an award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its National Security Economic Theory program, aka NASCENT. The award supports pioneering research at the intersection of economics, national security, and global strategic competition.
Award recipients Emily Blanchard, professor of international economics at the Tuck School of Business, Dean Lacy, professor of government, and Peter Chin, professor of engineering at the Thayer School of Engineering, are among a select cohort of researchers funded through NASCENT, DARPA’s initiative to build the scientific foundations of geoeconomics—the study of how economic policies and actions influence geopolitical outcomes.
“The world’s biggest economic and security challenges don’t respect disciplinary boundaries, and neither should the research that addresses them,” Lacy says. “This award allows Dartmouth to connect expertise in business, economics, engineering, and political science to study a rapidly changing global landscape.”
The goal of the DARPA program, the researchers say, is to develop new concepts, tools, and techniques to answer important questions motivated by geopolitics, grounded in economic mechanism design and leveraging new methods from computer science.
“Researchers like Dean and Emily have been thinking about these questions for many years now,” Chin says.
The team’s approach centers on a fundamental challenge of economic statecraft. Any policy intervention, such as a tariff, sanctions program, industrial policy, or export control, will involve an array of actors, including private companies and governments with disparate and often unknown incentives and preferences. Because countries and industries around the world are closely connected, a disruption in one part of the global economy can quickly spread to others.
“Identifying and evaluating effective policies in this environment is essentially a spectacularly messy combinatorial problem that can’t be solved by pen and paper,” Blanchard says. “Our idea is to use new machine learning techniques to search for potential policy mechanisms directly, surface designs nobody would have guessed, then work backward to figure out the intuition behind why they work.”
The Dartmouth team will bring complementary capabilities across economics, political economy, and computational mechanism design to the project.
“What excites me the most about this award is for us to have the opportunity to work together across disciplines and have our collaborative research serve a greater purpose of potential national impact than our separate individual scholarship may afford,” Chin says.
Lacy has long focused on how governments’ policy preferences across economics, politics, and security interact—the inconvenient but irrefutable reality that these domains cannot be treated as separate.
Blanchard brings deep experience in global economic linkages, global value chains, and economic policy instruments. More recently, she saw firsthand the complexity of deploying these tools of statecraft while serving in Washington as chief economist of the U.S. Department of State from January 2022 to November 2023.
Chin has been building the machine-learning architecture and algorithms needed to make these problems tractable. The project is further supported by Sean Hwang, a postdoctoral researcher, and Mai Pham, a PhD student in Chin’s Learning, Intelligence + Signal processing lab.
“The award highlights the importance of Dartmouth’s doctoral programs,” Lacy says. He credits the new PhD Program in Computational Science and Modeling for helping forge the connections that made the collaboration possible. “CSMP, the Davidson Institute’s International Security and Economics pilot, and other cross-disciplinary degree programs and institutes provide the kind of interdisciplinary environments needed to tackle emerging research areas like geoeconomics,” he says.
The researchers also look forward to working with undergraduates during the project.
“It was a competitive selection process, and we’re thrilled to have been chosen and to be part of such a diverse and high-caliber group of labs and performers from across the country,” Blanchard says. “There’s a lot of innovation and collaboration ahead.”
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Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
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