Wise Choices: Decisions, Games and Negotiations

by Richard J. Zeckhauser, Ralph L. Keeney, and James K. Sebenius, 1996, Harvard Business School Press, 478 p.

This book is a collection of essays in tribute to the lifetime achievements of Howard Raiffa. Harvard professor Raiffa is a pioneer of decision analysis, game theory and negotiations. Since 1951 he has expanded and integrated these fields.

The contributors include some of the notables of the fields: David Bell, Rex Brown, Ron Howard, Amos Tversky and others. Among the 23 chapters are:

* Valuing Billions of Dollars (how the public reacts to large dollar outcomes, by Ralph Keeney)

* Options (lucid description and examples, by Ron Howard)

* Measuring Risk and Return for Portfolios [trying to reconcile multiplicative (financial theory) vs. additive (decision analysis) approaches, by David Bell]

* Global Decisions for the Very Long Term (future generations will be better off, and improvements will be mostly in the lesser developed countries: implications for intergenerational transfers and PV discount rate; by Thomas Schelling)

* Decision Analysis in Health and Medicine (Milton Weinstein)

This book is advanced but provides a great guide to the literature. One could do worse than read the books and articles generated by Raiffa and the authors of this book. This is an excellent and fairly comprehensive bibliography of decision analysis and the allied fields.

--John Schuyler, October 1996