Howard Raiffa: The Art, Science, and Humanity of a Legendary Negotiation Analyst

Widely considered to be the "father of negotiation analysis," Howard Raiffa was my thesis adviser, colleague, and friend for more than thirty years. With a range of colleagues from different disciplines, he cofounded the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School in 1983, which has thrived to this day as a consortium of faculty and graduate students from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University. As a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s, Howard was drawn to the excitement of game theory, which had been launched by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944) with their magisterial Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Game theory held the high promise of characterizing a wide variety of human "strategic" interactions -- the moves and countermoves in cooperative and competitive situations -- using a small number of scientific principles. Following his retirement in 1996, Raiffa sought to advance a more unified approach to decision making, drawing on the various emphases of his earlier work.