To live life is to make decisions. This is true for organizations and individuals, for self-interested choices and for actions that affect the decisions and welfare of others. This book is inspired by the lifetime intellectual odyssey of Howard Raiffa, pioneer decision analyst, game theorist, and scholar of negotiation. As his own work has progressed from statistical decision theory to game theory to decision analysis to negotiation analysis, his central question has always been: How can we make wise choices?
In this collection leading scholars in economics, psychology, statistics, and decision theory grapple with the perennial question of how to make a wise choice. 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.
Taken together, this body of papers points to a modern decision research that is not imprisoned in separate methodological cells, but that rigorously and aptly draws from many related sources in search of truly wise decisions. Thus we have game-theoretic treatments of market entry or coalition formation that utilize behavioral insights and experimental findings as well as abstract equilibrium characterizations. Negotiation analyses explicitly proceed in the sequential manner of decision analysis, attending to how uncertainties unfold. Empirically informed assessments of how negotiation partners or market competitors behave compliment traditional insights from game theory. Ethical reasoning is infused with strategic logic and pleasingly, the converse is true as well.
Despite the tremendous range of decision situations addressed here, the choices have much in common: their consequences are important. They confront uncertainty. They alternatives are not clearly delineated. Indeed, a first step in many real decisions is to recognize that a decision must be made.
The substance of the decisions analyzed in this volume ranges from personal medical problems to national public policies, from business investments to international diplomacy, from decisions based on the monetary bottom line to those founded on fundamental moral principles. The central theme for all is that wise choices flow from systematic analysis.
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