Born and raised in Arcata, California in 1960, Hackett obtained his BS in Agricultural Business and Economics at the Montana State University in 1983.
[2] Early on Hackett's research was focused on the economic performance of contractual relationships, such as the social dilemmas associated with common-pool resources like oil and gas fields, groundwater basins or marine fisheries.
This work began at Texas A&M and was further cultivated by his affiliation with Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis while a member of the graduate faculty at Indiana University in Bloomington.
[3] He was particularly interested in the challenges of structuring successful agreements capable of preventing opportunistic behavior when stakeholders are heterogeneous, or have made prior relationship-specific investments (research influenced by the work of Nobel Laureate Oliver Williamson).
In several papers Hackett and collaborators investigated how voluntary actions by firms to limit pollution can have strategic value relative to competitors, or as a way of shaping future regulatory policy.