Zeno

Even if admissions people assume you had no creative role in the paper, it's still likely more correlated with future research output than your undergrad grades are. Also, it may mean people will pay closer attention to your LOR from that professor, since he will presumably have very precise information about your capabilities.

Reminder: a department's goal isn't to be "fair". They have limited information, and their sole goal is to use that limited information to make their best guess of who will perform well in their program. You may be concerned that they're not optimally using the limited information they have, but that's different from any notion of fairness.

Seconded.

I disagree that you have to be dead set on a PhD in economics. Let me qualify it as: you have to either be dead set on getting a PhD in econ, or know you're the sort of person who would be willing to drop out if you get two years in and then realize the PhD isn't for you. If you're built (like many people) to be time-inconsistent when it comes to quitting decisions, then it's a 5+ year commitment. If you'd be willing to walk away, then the PhD is as valuable as its option value.

MEDS seems like a great choice for your interests.

My thoughts: Though I don't know this for sure, I strongly suspect (as others here have said more firmly) that a PhD is not the most effective choice for your career in consulting. That said, if you think spending ~5 years of your life doing a PhD is something that appeals to you, I imagine your consulting career can withstand the hiatus just fine. The new letters added to your name may even partially make up for the lost opportunity for professional growth. If you want to do a PhD for your career, it's probably not optimal. If you want to do it for fun (and I find it immensely fun myself), do it; life is short.

I'd say the same about Harvard: they don't specialize in micro theory the way some top schools do, but Harvard is still one of the few best places in the world to learn micro theory. [People love to argue about who's top 3 or top 15, but the fact is there are a lot of places that can give you a really first-rate education in game/decision theory.] For Harvard, I'm told there's essentially no difference between being in regular Econ vs. BusEc.

They're great. They don't specialize in micro theory the way, say, Stanford or Northwestern does, but MIT is still one of the few best places in the world to learn micro theory. Their regular econ department would be a better match for your interests than Sloan, but that's not true of all universities. The other two I mentioned above are prime examples of places where the business school is the top theory department.

Two CS places that come to mind are CMU & Cornell. Two very different examples of CS people doing something that one might call game theory: - Joe Halpern (Cornell) does work on formal reasoning about knowledge and rationality.' - Tuomas Sandholm (CMU) does work on mechanism design that takes into account that players may be computationally limited.

I'm at a school that has an econ PhD and a strategy PhD. The strategy program has the same requirements minus first-year macro. If you do strategy here, you're an economist who researches IO. I'm not sure whether any professors know who (among the IO students) is strategy vs. econ. No clue how representative that is, but count it as one data point in the "it doesn't matter" column.

I think I'd be too distracted by the gun in my face to appreciate any academic successes/opportunities.

It's a different sort of game theory, but you could look into some departments with non-economists studying game theory. For instance, there are some pretty great GTists at Fuqua's decision sciences group or the CS group at CMU.

Not "very far off" from econ, but I agree that he/she could find a very good match in the right CS department.

[OP: Our interests are very similar.] Let me second everything chateauheart said. More generally, I'd recommend keeping the black-and-white attitude toward macro etc. a little bit hidden. Even if you go into a more specialized program, the vast majority of departments hiring game/decision theorists are econ departments, so it's a safe bet that you'll find yourself in an Economics academic community. It may serve your interests not to be openly dismissive of other people's research areas. Even more than that, there's real value (academic and professional) in knowing enough to be able to talk across fields. My school has very, very strong groups for both macro and industrial organization, and some of those people are doing some seriously interesting applied game theory. If I hadn't taken a couple classes in macro and IO, I wouldn't be equipped to learn about the veiled game theory they're doing.

Some comments: - For its size, and given that you don't want to consider schools below top 30, that looks like a good list. That said, I'd suggest applying a bit more broadly unless you're quite content with your current school. - The dutch universities that I know have some excellent theorists, but in quite specialized fields. If your letter writers are from that crowd, you may want to consider which departments have people in related specialties, as they're more likely to know of your letter writers (and trust their quality).