Ashok Rai is Professor of Economics at Williams College.  His current research on the history of capitalism draws on fieldwork in coffee-growing areas of Central America and East Africa. In his teaching and scholarly writing, Rai uses game theory, a cross-disciplinary mathematical tool, to analyze how people interact — in the past and in the present.  He has a B.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Göttingen.