Howard Raiffa

Howard Raiffa, a 50+ year resident of Belmont, passed away peacefully on July 8th at his home in Tuscon, Arizona after a long battle with Parkinsons disease. He was 92. Professor Raiffa was a co-founder of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (now the Kennedy School), the Frank P. Ramsay Professor (Emeritus) of Managerial Economics, a joint chair held by Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School, and a member of the university faculty for 37 years. He was an influential Bayesian decision theorist and pioneer in the field of decision analysis, an academic discipline that encompasses negotiating techniques, conflict resolution, risk analysis and game theory. He also helped found and was the first director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria, a joint American-Soviet research organization that explored energy, pollution and other issues as a cooperative venture during the Cold War. The first of his 11 books, Games and Decisions (with R. Duncan Luce) published in 1957, remains a classic source for the basic concepts of game theory, laying the foundations for decision making under uncertainty. A stream of other seminal books followed that he authored or coauthored, including Decision Analysis, the first volume written on that subject; Applied Statistical Decision Theory (with Robert Schlaifer); and Decisions with Multiple Objectives. After his interest turned to negotiation, he wrote the Art and Science of Negotiation in 1982 and Negotiation Analysis in 2003. In 1998, he published Smart Choices (with John S. Hammond and Ralph L. Keeney), which synthesizes the major lessons from decision analysis research and applications. Howard Raiffa was born in the Bronx on January 24th, 1924, the son of a Russian immigrant who sold wool products, and the former Hilda Kaplan. He earned a bachelors degree in mathematics, a masters in statistics and a doctorate in mathematics, all from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He later received honorary degrees from Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Northeastern, the University of Michigan and Ben Gurion University of the Negev. In 1945 he married Estelle Schwartz. He and his former teenage sweetheart celebrated their 70th anniversary in 2015. She and his daughter, Judith, and son, Mark, survive him, as do four grandchildren: Greg, Sofia, Marlee and Eli. After teaching at Columbia University from 1952 to 1957, he joined the faculty of the business school at Harvard and moved to Belmont. At Harvard, he supervised approximately 100 doctoral students. Always modest about his own achievements, he said that the pride of his career were the dissertations written by his students, which he displayed around his office at HBS. As a professor and advisor, he was known for giving freely of his time and ideas to students, and also for his exceptional generosity. Howard and Estelle were also active members of the Belmont Community. Estelle was an elected 30-year member of the Town Meeting, one of the creators of the Roxbury-Belmont Summer Program, and a founding member of the Belmont Senior Center. While he enjoyed many happy and productive retirement years in Tuscon, he will be laid to rest in the family plot at Highland Meadow Cemetery on Belmont Hill. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to a fund at IIASA supporting scholars use of decision analysis to help struggling countries solve real-world problems.