John Padgett is a Professor specializing in American politics, organizational theory, mathematical models, and public policy. He is best known for his models of the federal budget process, although he has written on a variety of topics. The American Journal of Sociology published both his 1993 article "Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434" and his 1985 essay "The Emergent Organization of Plea Bargaining." He is a Director of the Organizations and State-Building Workshop.

Recently, Prof. John Padgett has been awarded a grant, entitled "Modelling Organizational Innovation in Renaissance Florence," for $600,000 over three years from the Human and Social Dynamics program of the National Science Foundation. The intellectual goals of the project are empirically to study and analytically to model the micro-historical process of organizational innovation in Renaissance Florence. The official grant abstract is available here, and the full grant proposal submitted to the NSF is available here. The grant is administered through the Santa Fe Institute.