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. He is an influential Bayesian decision theorist and negotiation theorist. His book Applied Statistical Decision Theorywith Robert Schlaifer introduced the idea of conjugate prior distributions. A lecture of his in the 1960s concerning the use of Bayesian methods for betting on horses gave John Craven USN, a US Navy scientist the idea of using Bayesian methods to search for a missing US Air Force hydrogen bomb lost near Palomares, Spain in 1966. Craven used the same methods again in the search for the lost submarine USS Scorpion in 1968. Raiffa has analysed situations involving the use of subjective probability and argues that subjective probabilities should follow the same rules (the Kolmogorov axioms) as objective, frequency-based probabilities. Frank Plumpton Ramsey (February 22, 1903 РJanuary 19, 1930) was a British mathematician, philosopher and economist. ... A professor is a senior teacher, lecturer and researcher, usually in a college or university. ... U.S. Economic Calendar Economics at the Open Directory Project Economics textbooks on Wikibooks The Economists Economics A-Z Institutions and organizations Bureau of Labor Statistics - from the American Labor Department Center for Economic and Policy Research (USA) National Bureau of Economic Research (USA) - Economics material from the organization... John F. Kennedy School of Government The John F. Kennedy School of Government is one of the graduate schools of Harvard University. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... Bayesian refers to probability and statistics -- either methods associated with the Reverend Thomas Bayes (ca. ... Decision theory is an interdisciplinary area of study, related to and of interest to practitioners in mathematics, statistics, economics, philosophy, management and psychology. ... Negotiation is the process whereby interested parties resolve disputes, agree upon courses of action, bargain for individual or collective advantage, and/or attempt to craft outcomes which serve their mutual interests. ... John Craven is the former Chief Scientist of the US Navys Special Projects Office. ... The United States Navy (USN) is the branch of the United States armed forces responsible for naval operations. ... Palomares is a fishing village in Spain. ... 1966 was a common year starting on Saturday (link goes to calendar) // Events January January 1 - In a coup, Colonel Jean-B̩del Bokassa ousts president David Dacko and takes over the Central African Republic. ... Six vessels of the United States Navy -- four ships and two submarines -- have borne the name USS Scorpion, named for scorpions, an order of arachnids having an elongated body and a narrow segmented tail bearing a venomous sting at the tip. ... Bayesianism is the philosophical tenet that the mathematical theory of probability applies to the degree of plausibility of statements, or to the degree of belief of rational agents in the truth of statements; when used with Bayes theorem, it then becomes Bayesian inference. ... The probability of some event (denoted ) is defined with respect to a universe or sample space of all possible elementary events in such a way that must satisfy the Kolmogorov axioms. ...

Consider two possible gambles.

Gamble A is that we bet on a head turning up when we toss a coin that is known to be fair.

Now consider gamble B, in which we bet that the world's greatest boxer will defeat the world's greatest wrestler in a ring fight. (Assume we are fairly ignorant about martial arts and would have great difficulty making a choice of who to bet on.)

Many people would feel more unsure about taking gamble B than gamble A, in which the probabilities are easily seen to be one half for each outcome. In the case of gamble B Raiffa argues that a decision-maker should assign a subjective probability of one-half to each outcome of gamble B, provided that no information was available which makes one outcome more likely than the other. Others are uncomfortable with his reasoning and Dempster-Shafer theory is one attempt to devise an alternative formalism. The Dempster-Shafer theory is a mathematical theory of evidence [SH76] based on belief functions and plausible reasoning, which is used to combine separate pieces of information (evidence) to calculate the probability of an event. ...

External links

Howard Raiffa's page at Harvard http://www.pon.harvard.edu/about/scommittee/hraiffa.php3