The Russell Sage Foundation is saddened to report the passing of mathematician and economist Howard Raiffa, who served on the foundation’s board of trustees and on the advisory committee of the foundation’s Behavioral Economics program in the 1980s.

Raiffa, a pioneer in the field of decision analysis, was the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Managerial Economics at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. He was also a founding director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, he taught at Columbia University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, his master’s in statistics and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Raiffa authored or co-authored eleven books, including Applied Statistical Decision Theory with Robert Schlaifer (1961), Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on Choices Under Uncertainty(1968), The Art and Science of Negotiation: How to Resolve Conflicts and Get the Best Out of Bargaining (1982), and Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions with John S. Hammond and Ralph L. Keeney (1998).

Click here to read the New York Times obituary.