George Akerlof is the Daniel E. Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Akerlof is a 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science; he was honored for his theory of asymmetric information and its effect on economic behavior. He is also the 2006 President of the American Economic Association. He served earlier as vice president and member of the executive committee. He is also on the North American Council of the Econometric Association.
Research interests include Sociology and economics; theory of unemployment; asymmetric information; staggered contract theory; money demand; labor market flows; theory of business cycles; economics of social customs; measurement of unemployment; economics of discrimination.
Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Operations Research, emeritus; a CHP/PCOR fellow; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. His work has been primarily in economic theory and operations, focusing on areas including social choice theory, risk bearing, medical economics, general equilibrium analysis, inventory theory, and the economics of information and innovation. He was one of the first economists to note the existence of a learning curve, and he also showed that under certain conditions an economy reaches a general equilibrium. In 1972, together with Sir John Hicks, he won the Nobel Prize in economics, for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory
Arrow has served on the economics faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford. Prior to that, he served as a weather officer in the U.S. Air Corps (1942-46), and a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics (1947-49). In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He received a BS from City College, an MA and PhD from Columbia University, and holds approximately 20 honorary degrees.
Professor Colin F. Camerer is the Rea and Lela Axline Professor of Business Economics at the California Institute of Technology (located in Pasadena, California), where he teaches cognitive psychology and economics. Professor Camerer earned a BA degree in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins in 1977, and an MBA in finance (1979) and a Ph.D. in decision theory (1981, at age 22) from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before coming to Caltech in 1994, Camerer worked at the Kellogg, Wharton, and University of Chicago business schools.
He studies both behavioral and experimental economics. In most recent books include Behavioral Game Theory (2003, Princeton University Press), Foundations of Human Sociality (with 14 co-authors, 2004, Oxford University Press) and Advances in Behavioral Economics, co-edited with George Loewenstein and Matthew Rabin (2004).
Neil Doherty is the Frederick H. Ecker professor of insurance and risk management and chair of the Department of Insurance and Risk Management at the Wharton School. A principal area of interest is in corporate risk management focusing on the financial strategies for managing risks that traditionally have been insurable. Such strategies include the use of existing derivatives, the design of new financial products and the use of capital structure. Professor Doherty has written three books in this area (Corporate Risk Management: A Financial Exposition,1985, The Financial Theory of Insurance Pricing, 1987 (with S. D’Arcy)) and Integrated Risk Management, 2000.
His other area of interest is the economics of risk and information, adverse selection, the value of information, and the design of insurance contracts with imperfect information and related issues. His papers on these subjects have appeared a numerous journals, including the Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. He is the co-author of Managerial Economics (2003, with B. Allen and K. Weigelt). In 2005, Doherty coauthored two reports on the insurance industry. The first, The Economics of Insurance Intermediaries provided an economic analysis of some of the issues raised by Elliot Spitzer’s investigation into broker compensation and bidding for insurance. The second, TRIA and beyond, as part of the Wharton Risk Center’s Managing and Financing Extreme Events project, provided an economic analysis of terrorism insurance and the public policy option facing the government with the expiration of TRIA.
Baruch Fischhoff is Howard Heinz University Professor, in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where he heads the Decision Sciences major. A graduate of the Detroit Public Schools, he holds a BS in mathematics and psychology from Wayne State University and an MA and PhD in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and has served on some two dozen NAS/NRC/IOM Committees. He is past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and of the Society for Risk Analysis. He chairs the Food and Drug Administration Risk Communication Advisory Committee and the Environmental Protection Agency?s Homeland Security Advisory Committee.
He is a member of the Environmental Protection Agency Scientific Advisory Board, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee; the World Federation of Scientists Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism, and the Department of State Global Expertise Program. He was a founding member of the Eugene, Oregon, Commission on the Rights of Women.
Dr. Fischhoff’s research includes risk communication, analysis and management; adolescent decision making; informed consent; security; and environmental protection. He has co-authored or edited four books, Acceptable Risk (1981), A Two-State Solution in the Middle East: Prospects and Possibilities (1993), Preference Elicitation (1999), and Risk Communication: The Mental Models Approach (2001).
Kenneth A. Froot is Andr? R. Jakurski Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University's Graduate School of Business Administration. He teaches courses in Capital Markets, International Finance, and Risk Management. From 1995-2000 he served as Director of Research of HBS and from 1993-1999 he held the Industrial Bank of Japan Professorship in Finance. From 1991-1993 he held the Thomas Henry Carroll-Ford Foundation Visitor's Chair at Harvard, while on leave from MIT's Sloan School of Management. At MIT, he held the Ford International Development Chair. He has taught executive education programs at MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and for many corporations and institutions in addition to his regular teaching of MBAs and Ph.D.s.
Professor Froot received his B.A. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He spent the 1988-1989 academic year as an Olin Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is Research Associate and Chair of the NBER?s Insurance Group. His research on a wide range of topics in finance, risk management, and international markets has been published in many journals and books. He is Editor of the Journal of International Financial Management and Accounting, Associate Editor of the Journal of International Economics, and of The Financing of Catastrophe Risk, Foreign Direct Investment, and The Transition in Eastern Europe, Vols. 1 and 2. He is a member of the American Finance Association, the American Economics Association, and the Behavioral Finance Working Group, and served as a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Professor Froot is a founding partner of FDO Partners, LLC and State Street Associates, firms producing investment and knowledge resources for global investors. Froot has also been a consultant to many companies, countries, and official institutions, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. He has worked with a number of financial intermediaries and other financial corporations on international financial, risk management and investment management issues. He serves on boards and policy review committees of several corporations and financial institutions. He has also acted as a Financial Adviser to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia and to the Finance Minister of Poland, and served on the staff of the US President's Council of Economic Advisers and the Economic Advisory Board of the Export-Import Bank of the US.
Christian Gollier is currently Deputy Director at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), Research Director at the Institut d'Economie Industrielle (IDEI) and Director of the Laboratory of Environment and Resources Economics, Toulouse, France. Dr. Gollier holds a PhD in Economics, and a MA in Applied Mathematics from the Catholic University of Louvain. His current research extends from decision theory under uncertainty to environmental economics, with a special focus on long term effects.
He has been a consultant for various industries and public institutions, on issues such as social security reforms, the economics of climate change, and corporate social responsibility. He has written and edited 7 books on risk including The Economics of Risk and Time (2001, MIT Press), and was a lead author of the 2007 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Among many prizes and honors, Professor Gollier received several awards, including Member of the Institut Universitaire de France, the Paul A. Samuelson award, and the ?GSU-ARIA? Award for the best paper presented at the first World Risk and Insurance Congress (2005). He is the former president of the Risk Theory Society and of the European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists.
Geoffrey Heal is Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Responsibility and Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, and Professor of Public and International Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs. He received his PhD in Physics and Economics at Cambridge University, where he obtained a First Class Honors degree and a Doctorate, and then taught at Cambridge, Stanford, Yale and Princeton. Dr. Heal's research fields include the securitization of catastrophic risks and analysis of the systemic risks associated with the growth of derivative markets. Another major research interest is the interaction between society and its natural resource base. A part of this agenda focuses on the extent to which market mechanisms can be instrumental in environmental conservation. In the Fall of 2001, in response to the events of 9/11/01, Dr. Heal began a research program on the economic aspects of security in highly interdependent systems. This program applies concepts from risk management and game theory to the analysis of the security of airlines, power grids, computer networks and other complex linked systems.
Recent books include Valuing the Future, Nature and the Marketplace, Topological Social Choice, Sustainability: Dynamics and Uncertainty , and Environmental Markets . He has published eight other books and over 150 articles. Dr. Heal is a member of the Pew Oceans Commission, a Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists (www.ucsusa.org), a Director of the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Chair of the National Academy/National Research Council's Committee on the Valuation of Ecosystem Services.
Robin M. Hogarth is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He was formerly the Wallace W. Booth Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business where he served as Deputy Dean from 1993 to 1998. Hogarth was a member of the Chicago faculty from 1979 to 2001 prior to which he held appointments at INSEAD in France and the London Business School. He earned his MBA from INSEAD (1968) and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1972).
His research has focused mainly on the psychology of judgment and decision making and he has published several books (including Judgment and Choice, Wiley, 2nd ed., 1987) and many articles in leading professional journals (e.g., Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Review, Management Science, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty). He is a past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and currently serves as President of the European Association for Decision Making. His most recent book, Educating Intuition, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001. In June 2007, Hogarth was awarded the degree of “doctor honoris causa” by the University of Lausanne.
Dwight M. Jaffee is the Willis Booth Professor of Banking, Finance, and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley, where has taught since 1991. He previously taught for many years in the economics department of Princeton University. Professor Jaffee is a member of the Haas School’s Finance and Real Estate groups, and co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968.
His primary areas of research include real estate finance (especially mortgage backed securitization and the government sponsored enterprises) and insurance (especially earthquakes, terrorism, and auto). He recently co-authored a book entitled Globalization and a High-Tech Economy: California, the US, and Beyond. He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, and has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has also served in numerous advisory roles for the World Bank, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Ralp Keeney is Research Professor of Decision Sciences at the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University. Dr. Keeney has a B.S. in Engineering from UCLA, a M.S and an E.E. in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT. Prior to joining the Duke faculty, Professor Keeney was a faculty member in Management and in Engineering at MIT and at the University of Southern California, a Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, and the founder of the decision and risk analysis group of a large geotechnical and environmental consulting firm.
Professor Keeney is the author of many books and articles, including Decisions with Multiple Objectives (reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 1993), co-authored with Howard Raiffa, which won the ORSA Lanchester Prize, and Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decision Making, (Harvard University Press, 1992), which received the Decision Analysis Society Best Publication Award. His latest book Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) with John S. Hammond and Howard Raiffa also received the Decision Analysis Society Best Publication Award. It has been translated into thirteen languages. Dr. Keeney was awarded the Ramsey Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Decision Analysis by the Decision Analysis Society and is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Paul R. Kleindorfer is the Anheuser Busch Professor of Management Science (Emeritus) at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Distinguished Research Professor at INSEAD. Dr. Kleindorfer graduated with distinction from the U. S. Naval Academy in 1961. He studied on a Fulbright Fellowship in Mathematics at the University of T?bingen, Germany (1964/65), followed by doctoral studies in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University (Ph.D., 1970).
Dr. Kleindorfer has held university appointments at Carnegie Mellon University (l968/9), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1969/72), The Wharton School (1973-2006), and several universities and international research institutes, including the University of Frankfurt (from which Dr. Kleindorfer was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2002), and INSEAD (Fontainebleau), where Dr. Kleindorfer is currently Distinguished Research Professor of Technology and Operations Management. Until 2005, he was the co-director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center that he founded in 1984 with Howard Kunreuther. Dr. Kleindorfer holds several editorial and professional positions, including being current president of the Society for Economic Design.
Carolyn Kousky is a Fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on natural resource management, land use, decision-making under uncertainty, and individual and societal responses to natural disaster risk. Her work assesses how decisions are made regarding low-probability events, at both the individual and societal levels, and how such decision-making can be improved. In particular, she has researched the management of flood risk in the United States, analyzing insurance decisions, floodplain management, and what individuals learn from the occurrence of an extreme event. In 2006-2007, she was a visiting scholar at the Wharton Risk Center working on flood insurance in the United States. She received a B.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University.
David H. Krantz graduated from Yale University (Mathematics) and received his Ph.D. (Psychology) from the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1985 and is currently Professor of Psychology and Statistics. Professor Krantz is founding Director of Columbia's Center for the Decision Sciences and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED); he has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been active in a number of roles in the Earth Institute at Columbia over the past 10 years.
Dr. Krantz's research focuses on problem solving, especially decision making, multiple goals, risky and inter-temporal choice, and the use of statistical concepts in everyday reasoning . Recent publications include ?Goals and plans in decision-making? (with Howard Kunreuther) in Judgment and Decision Making , and ?Individual Values and Social Goals in Environmental Decision Making? (with several CRED co-authors), in Decision Modeling and Behavior in Uncertain and Complex Environments.
Howard Kunreuther is the Cecilia Yen Koo Professor of Decision Sciences and Public Policy at the Wharton School, and Co-Director, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. He has a long-standing interest in ways that society can better manage low-probability/high-consequence events related to technological and natural hazards and has published extensively on the topic. He is a member of the OECD's High Level Advisory Board on Financial Management of Large-Scale Catastrophes; a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); a Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, receiving the Society's Distinguished Achievement Award in 2001. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Risk Network and co-chaired the WEF's Global Agenda Council on Mitigation of Natural Disasters.
Dr. Kunreuther has written and co-edited numerous articles and books, including Paying The Price: The State of Natural Disaster Insurance in the United States (with J. Roth, Sr., 1998), On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina, (with R.J. Daniels and D.F. Kettl; 2006), At War with the Weather (with E. Michel-Kerjan, MIT Press, 2009), and Learning from Catastrophes (with M. Useem, Wharton School Publishing, 2009). He is the recipient of the Elizur Wright Award for the publication that makes the most significant contribution to the literature of insurance. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer is leader of the Risk and Vulnerability Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. She is an economist by training, and has received a BS and PhD at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Maryland, respectively. Her current interest is global change and the risk of catastrophic events, and she is investigating options for improving the financial management of catastrophic risks in transition and developing countries. She and her colleagues have carried out extensive research on this topic and are developing options for the donor communities, as well as the climate adaptation community, to support insurance and other forms pro-active disaster assistance. She is an associate editor of the Journal for Risk Research and on the editorial board of Risk Analysis and Risk Abstracts. Other affiliations include the faculty of Beijing Normal University and the Science Committee of the Chinese Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management.
Robert Meyer is the Gayfryd Steinberg Professor and Co-Director of Wharton's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. His research focuses on consumer decision analysis, sales response modeling, and decision making under uncertainty. Robert Meyer recently completed a six-year term as the Vice Dean of Wharton's doctoral programs.
As co-director of Wharton's Risk Center, some of Professor Meyer's recent research has focused on how individuals decide to invest in mitigation against low-probability, high-consequence, events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or terrorist attacks. Using laboratory simulations Professor Meyer and his colleagues have been able to show that the much-publicized failures of preparation that contributed to the losses from such recent events as the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina are consistent with a number of hard-wired biases in how people respond to risk. This includes a tendency for people to fail to learn as much as they should from near-misses, and under-invest in instruments whose value can only be realized in the long run. Professor Meyer's work has appeared in a wide variety of professional journals and books, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Management Science. He has served as the editor of Marketing Letters as well as an associate editor of Marketing Science and the Journal of Consumer Research.
Erwann Michel-Kerjan teaches Value Creation the Wharton School's MBA program. He is the Managing Director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, a center with over 25 years of experience in developing strategies and policies for dealing with catastrophic risks. He is also a research associate at the Ecole Polytechnique (France) where he completed his doctoral studies in economics and mathematics in 2002.
Dr. Michel-Kerjan serves as elected chairman of the OECD’s Secretary General High Level Advisory Board on Financial Management of Large-Scale Catastrophes. In 2007, he was honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (Davos), an honor bestowed to recognize and acknowledge the most extraordinary leaders of the world under the age of 40.
He has published extensively on how to better manage extreme events, such as natural disasters, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and pandemics. From 2003 to 2005 he served on the OECD Task Force on Terrorism Insurance which published Terrorism Insurance in OECD Countries in July 2005, and in 2005 he co-led, with Howard Kunreuther, the Wharton initiative TRIA and Beyond on the future of terrorism risk financing in the United States. His book Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response, How Private Action Can Reduce Public Vulnerability (with P. Auerswald, L. Branscomb and T. LaPorte, Cambridge University Press, 2006), is the first attempt to analyze the private efficiency-public vulnerability trade-off in the context of extreme event management. He is also the author of At War with the Weather (with H. Kunreuther, MIT Press, 2009), resulting from the Wharton Risk Center's multi-year study on Managing and Financing Extreme Events.
David A. Moss is the John G. McLean Professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy area. Moss earned a BA from Cornell University and an M.A. in economics and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.
Professor Moss is the author numerous articles, book chapters, and case studies, mainly in the fields of institutional and policy history, political economy, and comparative social policy. He is the author of Socializing Security: Progressive-Era Economists and the Origins of American Social Policy (Harvard University Press, 1996) which traces the intellectual and institutional origins of the American welfare state, and When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Harvard University Press, 2002) which explores the government's pivotal role as a risk manager in policies ranging from limited liability and bankruptcy law to social insurance and federal disaster relief. Professor Moss is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Social Insurance. Recent honors include the Robert F. Greenhill Award, the Editors' Prize from the American Bankruptcy Law Journal, the Student Association Faculty Award for outstanding teaching at the Harvard Business School, and the American Risk and Insurance Association's Kulp-Wright Book Award.
Robert O'Connor has been directing the Decision, Risk and Management Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation since 2001. Dr. O'Connor earned his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University and his doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to NSF, Dr. O'Connor was a Professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University. The U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Science Foundation funded Dr. O'Connor's research into public perceptions of cumulative, uncertain long-term risks, of technologies perceived as risky, and of agency risk communications.
At NSF he also manages the Decision, Risk and Uncertainty area of emphasis of the Human and Social Dynamics initiative. In addition, O'Connor serves on the management teams for the Decision Making under Uncertainty for Climate Change (DMUU) centers and the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems Program. Dr. O'Connor represents the National Science Foundation on two interagency groups; one is the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Interagency Working Group on Human Contributions and Responses; the other is the Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction of the National Science and Technology Council of the Executive Office of the President.
Ayse Öncüler is Associate Professor of Marketing at ESSEC Business School in France. She holds a Masters degree in Applied Economics and a PhD in Decision Sciences (under the supervision of Howard Kunreuther), both from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Her academic research focuses on risky decision-making over time, covering a variety of applications from risk mitigation investments to consumer behavior. Recently she has been working on ambiguity and probability transformation in intertemporal choice. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Management Science and Social Psychology Quarterly and has been reviewed in media outlets such as the Financial Times and CFO Europe.
Olivier Oullier is an associate professor of neuroscience at Aix-Marseille University (France) and a research associate at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences (Florida Atlantic University). His work focuses on multi-level social coordination dynamics, embodied cognition and neuroeconomics.
A member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Decision-Making and Incentive, he is scientific advisor to the French Prime Minister's Center for Strategic Analysis in charge of the ?Neuroscience and Public Policy? program ? the world's first institutional initiative to specifically evaluate and implement the applications of the newly found knowledge on brain sciences to health prevention, risk management, education and justice. Founder of the first graduate course on neuroeconomics and neuroethics in France, Dr. Oullier serves as an expert on these topics for various public and private institutions including the French Parliament and the European Commission. His book The State of Mind in Decision-Making: Neuroeconomics and Beyond (with Alan Kirman and Scott Kelso), is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Mark Pauly is the Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Systems at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is Professor of Health Care Systems, Insurance and Risk Management, and Business and Public Policy at the Wharton School and Professor of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Virginia.
Dr. Pauly is a former commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission and an active member of the Institute of Medicine. One of the nation's leading health economists, Dr. Pauly's classic study on the economics of moral hazard was the first to point out how health insurance coverage may affect patients' use of medical services. Subsequent work, both theoretical and empirical, has explored the impact of conventional insurance coverage on preventive care, on outpatient care, and on prescription drug use in managed care. In addition, he has explored the influences that determine whether insurance coverage is available and, through several cost effectiveness studies, the influence of medical care and health practices on health outcomes and cost. His interests in health policy deal with ways to reduce the number of uninsured through tax credits for public and private insurance, and appropriate design for Medicare in a budget-constrained environment.
Dr. Pauly has served on Institute of Medicine panels on public accountability for health insurers under Medicare and on improving the financing of vaccines. Dr. Pauly recently served as a member of the Medicare Technical Advisory Panel. He is a co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics and an associate editor of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.
John W. Pratt is the William Ziegler professor of business administration, emeritus, at Harvard Business School. He received his education at Princeton and Stanford, specializing in mathematics and statistics. He was the Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association from 1965 to 1970, and chaired National Academy of Sciences committees on environmental monitoring, census methodology, and the future of statistics. He is a fellow of five professional societies. He has co-authored or edited books on Statistical Decision Theory, Statistical and Mathematical Aspects of Pollution Problems, Social Experimentation, Nonparametric Statistics, and Principals and Agents. His other research interests have included statistical inference, approximation of probability distributions, utility theory, risk aversion, risk sharing, incentives, statistical causality, and currently, fair division. He is an avid amateur pianist.
Howard Raiffa is the Frank P. Ramsey Professor (Emeritus) of Managerial Economics, a joint chair held by the Business School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Professor Raiffa has worked in operations research, game theory, statistical decision theory, decision analysis, risk analysis, behavioral decision theory, and in conflict resolution and mediation and has received lifetime achievement awards from societies representing each of these fields.
A mathematician by training, Raiffa is an originator of the now famous "decision tree," and has done extensive work on developing techniques to help decision makers think more systematically about complex choices involving uncertainties and tradeoffs. Professor raiffa has published extensively; his books include: Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey, (Wiley & Sons, 1957; with R. Luce), Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on Choices Under Uncertainty. (McGraw-Hill, 1997) and Applied Statistical Decision Theory (Wiley Classics Library, 2000). (with R. Schaifer). As a scientific adviser to McGeorge Bundy, White House assistant for national security under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, Howard Raiffa helped to negotiate the creation of an East-West think tank with the aim of reducing Cold War tensions.
Raiffa received his doctorate in mathematics in 1951 from the University of Michigan. He was an assistant professor of mathematical statistics at Columbia University before coming to Harvard in 1957. Raiffa became a professor in 1960, and in 1964 was named to the Ramsey chair, a joint chair held by the Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. With Roger Fisher at Harvard Law School, Raiffa helped to launch the Program on Negotiation. He has received numerous honorary degrees, and, in 2000, received the prestigious Dickson Prize for Science, conferred annually by University Professors at Carnegie Mellon University.
Thomas Schelling is Distinguished University Professor at the School of Public Policy of the University of maryland. Dr. Schelling came to the Maryland School of Public Affairs after twenty years at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he was the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy. He has published on military strategy and arms control, energy and environmental policy, climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, organized crime, foreign aid and international trade, conflict and bargaining theory, racial segregation and integration, the military draft, health policy, tobacco and drugs policy, and ethical issues in public policy and in business.
He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1991 he was President of the American Economic Association, of which he is a Distinguished Fellow. He was the recipient of the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy and the National Academy of Sciences award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War. In 2005 he received the Nobel Prize in economic sciences. He served in the Economic Cooperation Administration in Europe, and has held positions in the White House and Executive Office of the President, Yale University, the RAND Corporation and the Department of Economics and Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
Paul J. H. Schoemaker Ph.D. is the founder, chairman and CEO of Decision Strategies International, Inc., a consulting and training company specializing in strategic planning, executive development and multi-media software. Dr. Schoemaker further serves as the Research Director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches strategy and decision making. His main research interests are in the areas of business strategy, decision sciences, scenario planning, organizational dynamics, and emerging technologies. He has given many seminars on decision making and strategic thinking to executives in Europe, America, and the Far East, and has appeared on radio and television. During 1982-1984, Dr. Schoemaker took an extended full-time sabbatical with the strategy group of Royal Dutch/Shell in London, where he helped pioneer scenario planning. Since then he has consulted with over a hundred companies.
Schoemaker started his studies in physics and mathematics at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame with a B.S. in physics in 1972. He received an M.B.A. in Finance, an M.A. in Management, and a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences, all three degrees from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written eight books and over 100 papers which have appeared in journals ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the Journal of Economic Literature. Schoemaker's articles have received several awards including the prestigious Best Paper Prize of the Strategic Management Society in 2000. His 1995 paper on scenario planning ranks in the top five all time reprints of the Sloan Management Review. He was Howard Kunreuther’s first PhD student at Wharton, and co-authored several papers with him as well as the book Decision Sciences, An Integrated Perspective (with Paul Kleindorfer and Howard Kunreuther) (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Robert J. Shiller is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University, and Professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the MIT in 1972.
Professor Shiller has written on financial markets, financial innovation, behavioral economics, macroeconomics, real estate, statistical methods, and on public attitudes, opinions, and moral judgments regarding markets. He is the author of many books including Subprime Solution: How the Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, 2008), which offers an analysis of the housing and economic crisis and a plan of action against it. He co-authored, with George Akerlof, Animal Spirits (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has been research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1980, and has been co-organizer of NBER workshops on behavioral finance, and on macroeconomics and individual decision making (behavioral macroeconomics). He served as Vice President of the American Economic Association, 2005 and President of the Eastern Economic Association, 2006-07. He writes a regular column "Finance in the 21st Century" for Project Syndicate, and "Economic View " for the New York Times.
Paul Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a founder and President of Decision Research. He holds both an M.A (1962) and Ph.D (1964) from the University of Michigan. He studies human judgment, decision making, and risk analysis.
He and his colleagues worldwide have developed methods to describe risk perceptions and measure their impacts on individuals, industry, and society. He publishes extensively and serves as a consultant to industry and government. His most recent books include The Perception of Risk (Earthscan; 2000), The Social Amplification of Risk (with N. Pidgeon and R. Kasperson) (Cambridge University Press; 2003) and The Construction of Preference (with S. Lichtenstein) (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Dr. Slovic is a past President of the Society for Risk Analysis and in 1991 received its Distinguished Contribution Award. In 1993 he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. In 1995 he received the Outstanding Contribution to Science Award from the Oregon Academy of Science. He has received honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics (1996) and the University of East Anglia (2005).
Cass R. Sunstein is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the most cited law professor on any faculty in the United States. He currently serves as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OMB) at the White House.
Professor Sunstein graduated in 1975 from Harvard College and in 1978 from Harvard Law School, both magna cum laude. After graduation, he clerked for Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, and then he worked as an attorney-advisor in the Office of the Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice. Before joining Harvard, he was a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School from 1981 to 2008. Sunstein's many books include After the Rights Revolution (1990), Risk and Reason (2002), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Worst-Case Scenarios (2007), and Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008). He is also coauthor of leading casebooks in both Constitutional Law and Administrative Law; his major academic specialties have been constitutional law, administrative law, and regulatory policy
W. Kip Viscusi is Vanderbilt's first University Distinguished Professor, with appointments in the Owen Graduate School of Management and the Department of Economics as well as in the Law School. Professor Viscusi is the award-winning author of more than 20 books and 250 articles, most of which deal with different aspects of health and safety risk.
Professor Viscusi is widely regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on cost-benefit analysis and his estimates of the value of risks to life and health are currently used throughout the Federal government. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the U.S. Department of Justice. He was deputy director of the Council of Wage and Price Stability in the Carter administration. He also served on the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for seven years and is currently on the EPA Homeland Security Committee. Professor Viscusi is the founding editor of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty , now housed at Vanderbilt. He is also the founding editor of the journal, Foundations and Trends: Microeconomics .
Dennis Wenger is the Program Director for Infrastructure Systems Management and Extreme Events at the National Science Foundation. He is also the Acting Program Director for the Civil Infrastructure Systems. Previously at Texas A&M University, Dr. Wenger was a Professor of Urban and Regional Science and the Founding Director and Senior Scholar of the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center.
Dr. Wenger has been engaged in research on hazards and disasters for over 40 years, focusing upon the social and multidisciplinary aspects of natural, technological, and human-induced disasters (emergency management capabilities and response, police and fire planning and response, search and rescue, mass media coverage of disasters, warning systems and public response, factors related to local community recovery success, and disaster beliefs and emergency planning). He is the author of numerous books, research monographs, articles and papers. Dr. Wenger currently serves as one of the nine members of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee to the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. For NSF, Dr. Wenger serves as the Foundation's representative to the Roundtable on Disasters of the National Academy of Science, and is Co-Chair for Science of the Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction of the National Science and Technology Council of the Executive Office of the President.
Richard Zeckhauser is the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at the Kennedy School, Harvard University, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Drawing on his experience playing bridge with Howard Kunreuther in high school, he won the United States Mixed Pairs Championship in 2007.
Current research projects look at outcomes that are the product of large number of decentralized individual decisions -- when they provide accurate judgments (as with eBay feedback or Motley Fool stock assessments), and when they go off the rails (as with prices in asset markets recently); and the influence of genes on risk-taking behavior. He is the author/coauthor of 240 papers. His recent books are: Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets, Removing Bad Apples with Peter Schuck (Brookings Institution Press, 2006), and The Patron's Payoff: Economic Frameworks for Conspicuous Commissions with Jonathan Nelson (Princeton University Press, 2008).