Wise Choices

by Zeckhauser, Richard J.; Keeney, Ralph L.; Sebenius, James K.

• ISBN13: 9780875846774
• ISBN10: 0875846777
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-07-01
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Pr

Summary

In this collection - a tribute to the lifetime intellectual odyssey of Howard Raiffa, world-renowned applied mathematician - leading scholars in economics, psychology, statistics, and decision theory grapple with the perennial question of how to make wise choices. Their answers reflect the unity of the three fields Raiffa pioneered: decision analysis, game theory, and negotiation.
The twenty-three papers in this collection address such topics as individual decision making under uncertainty, games of strategy in which one player's actions directly influence another's welfare, and the process of forging negotiated agreements. The contributors, including Thomas C. Schelling of the University of Maryland and Amos Tversky of Stanford, also analyze decisions regarding personal medical problems, national public policies, business investments, and international diplomacy.
Whether your challenge is to craft a stock portfolio, forge a diplomatic settlement, or make your technology a standard on the Internet, this volume will help you think deeply and choose wisely.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Contrasting Rational and Psychological Principles of Choice	p. 5
Sign Posting: The Selective Revelation of Product Information	p. 22
Normative Validity of Graphical Aids for Designing and Using Estimation Studies	p. 42
Valuing Billions of Dollars	p. 63
Options	p. 81
Measuring Risk and Return for Portfolios	p. 102
Upside Opportunity and Downside Risk	p. 119
Does Society Mismanage Risk?	p. 133
Global Decisions for the Very Long Term: Intergenerational and International Discounting	p. 152
Decision Analysis in Health and Medicine: Two Decades of Progress and Challenges	p. 169
Optimizing the Prenatal Detection of Down's Syndrome: A Decision-Analytic Economic Policy Analysis	p. 185
Expected Values of Information and Cooperation for Abating Global Climate Change	p. 199
Strategic and Structural Uncertainty in Games	p. 221
What Can You Learn from a Game?	p. 233
Coalition Formation, Communication, and Coordination: An Exploratory Experiment	p. 253
Market Entry Under Incomplete Information	p. 272
Rules of the Game, Permissible Harms, and the Principle of Fair Play	p. 301
Sequencing to Build Coalitions: With Whom Should I Talk First?	p. 324
International Trade Conflict and Negotiation: Unilateral Punishment, Bilateral Bargaining, and Multilateral Commitments	p. 349
Dividing the Indivisible	p. 370
Measuring Cooperation in Negotiations: The Impossible Dream	p. 388
Signaling in Negotiations	p. 400
The Art and Science of Howard Raiffa	p. 417
Index	p. 457
About the Contributors	p. 471
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