Decision Analysis: A Personal Account of How It Got Started and Evolved

In this chapter, Howard Raiffa discusses the evolution of decision analysis and his personal involvement in its development. He describes the early days of Operations Research (OR) in the late 1940s with its approach to complex, strategic decision making. After reading John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1947) and Abraham Wald’s two books (1947, 1950), he became involved in statistical decision theory.

A few years later, after reading Leonard Savage’s The Foundations of Statistics (1954), he became convinced that classical statistics was not the right approach to analysis for decision making. In 1957, with R. Duncan Luce, he published Games and Decisions (1957), which presented the theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern to a wider audience. In 1961, with Robert Schlaifer, he published Applied Statistical Decision Theory (1961) to prove that “whatever the objectivists could do, we subjectivists could also do – only better.”

In 1968, he published Decision Analysis (1968), the first book on the subject, and, in 1976, he published Decisions with Multiple Objectives (1976) with Ralph Keeney. These two books laid the foundation of decision analysis as it is practiced today. His interests then tuned to negotiation, resulting in the publication of The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982) and Negotiation Analysis (2002).

This abstract was taken from Chapter 4, Decision Analysis: A Personal Account of How It Got Started and Evolved in Advances in Decision Analysis: From Foundations to Applications.