Kenneth Arrow, Stanford *
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.
Colin Camerer, Caltech **
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).
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
Measuring Decision Process Directly |
Avinash K. Dixit, Princeton University **
Avinash Dixit is the Sherrerd University Professor of Economics at Princeton University. His research interests have included microeconomic theory, game theory, international trade, industrial organization, growth and development theories, public economics, political economy, and the new institutional economics.
His book publications include Theory of International Trade (with Victor Norman), Thinking Strategically (with Barry Nalebuff), Investment Under Uncertainty (with Robert Pindyck), The Making of Economic Policy: A Transaction Cost Politics Perspective, and Games of Strategy (with Susan Skeath), and Lawlessness and Economics. He has also published numerous articles in professional journals and collective volumes.
He was President of the Econometric Society in 2001, and a Vice-President of the American Economic Association in 2002. He is President-Elect of the latter for 2007, and will be President for 2008. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005, and a Corresponding (Foreign) Fellowship of the British Academy in 2006.
Dixit was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1944, and is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He was educated at St. Xavier’s College (Bombay), Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and professor at the University of Warwick, before joining Princeton in 1981. He has held visiting professorships at MIT, and visiting scholar positions at the International Monetary Fund, the London School of Economics, the Institute for International Economic Studies (Stockholm), and the Russell Sage Foundation.
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Neil Doherty, The Wharton School **
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. He 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, as well as several recent papers. The other area of interest is the economics of risk and information and has written papers on the adverse selection, the value of information, and the design of insurance contracts with imperfect information and related issues. These papers have appeared in the Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, etc.. He is also 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.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
Baruch Fischhoff, Carnegie Mellon University **
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).
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Kenneth A. Froot, Harvard **
Kenneth A. Froot is André 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, Toulouse School of Economics **
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 “Laboratoire d'Economie des Ressources Naturelles” (Laboratory of Environment and Resources Economics), Toulouse, France.
His current themes of research extend from decision theory under uncertainty to environmental economics, with a special focus on long term effects. He has published more than 70 articles in top-tier economic journals and he is also Associate Editor, editor or co-editor of several journals in the fields. He has also edited 7 books on risk including The Economics of Risk and Time (2001, MIT Press), winner of “the 2001 Paul A. Samuelson Award” and of the “2002 Prix Risques-les Echos.”
Prior to joining the University of Toulouse and the IDEI, he has lectured at the Universities of Louvain (Belgium), of California in San Diego (USA), of Montréal (Canada), of Wuhan (China), and of Georgia State (USA). He has also been professor at the French prestigious schools: “Ecole Polytechnique” and HEC. He also worked as a consultant for various industries and public institutions, with topics covering among else, social security reforms, the economics of climate changes, the corporate social responsibility, the management of nuclear wastes, or various aspects of the strategic assets allocation.
Dr. Gollier holds a PhD in Economics, and a MA in Applied Mathematics from the Catholic University of Louvain. Among many prizes and honors, Christian was awarded the Junior Member of the “Institut Universitaire de France”, the “Ernst Meyer” prize (Best European thesis prize on Insurance Economics), the Robert C. Witt Research Award for Outstanding Feature Article by the American Risk and Insurance Association, the “Paul A. Samuelson Award”, the Kulp-Wright Book Award” and more recently the “GSU-ARIA” Award for the best paper presented at the first World Risk and Insurance Congress (2005). He has also been President of the Risk Theory Society and of the European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists. He has been Lead Author of the recent Report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC, 2007).
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
Public Awareness, Collective Perils and The Sustainability of Our Development |
Geoffrey Heal, Columbia University **
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 has served as Vice Dean of the Business School and managed the Executive MBA Program.
Heal studied Physics and Economics at Cambridge, where he obtained a First Class Honors degree and a Doctorate, and then taught at Cambridge, Stanford, Yale and Princeton, and held a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Siena.
Dr. Heal has acted as Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies and has acted on the Editorial Boards of many other journals. In the 1970s he founded a London-based consulting firm, and in the 1980s a firm providing systems for telecommunications and data processing to the international securities business. He is a member of the Pew Oceans Commission ( www.pewoceans.org ), a Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists (www.ucsusa.org), a Director of the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (www.kva.se ), Chair of the National Academy/National Research Council’s Committee on the Valuation of Ecosystem Services, a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Dr. Heal has advised the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Mineworkers of America, and used to work as Advisor to the Secretary-General of OPEC.
Dr. Heal’s research fields include the management of risks by financial markets, and especially the securitization of catastrophic risks and analysis of the systemic risks associated with the growth of derivative markets. Dr. Heal has worked more generally on the application of mathematical modeling techniques in economic theory. As an extension of this research he has been involved in the design of new financial instruments and has acted as an advisor to financial institutions and other corporations.
Another major research interest is the interaction between society and its natural resource base. Dr. Heal has been working to formalize and make operational the concept of sustainability and to develop an interdisciplinary group of social and biological scientists committed to research on the interface between the biological and social sciences. A part of this agenda focuses on the extent to which market mechanisms can be instrumental in environmental conservation, the topic of his recent book “Nature and the Marketplace.”
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.
Robin Hogarth, Pompeu Fabra **
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.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
On coconuts in foggy mine-fields: An approach to studying future-choice decisions |
Dwight M. Jaffee, University of California at Berkeley **
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.
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.
He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
Catastrophe Insurance and Regulatory Reform After the Subprime Mortgage Crisis |
Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University *
Daniel Kahneman is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology (emeritus) at Princeton University. Formerly a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Kahneman is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society.
He has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), and the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, and the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007).
His most recent books include Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive Judgment (Cambridge University Press, 2002; with T. Gilovich, and D. Griffin) and Choices, values and frames (Cambridge University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation, 2000; with A. Tversky).
He holds a BA in Psychology and Mathematics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. He holds honorary degrees from numerous Universities.
Ralph Keeney, Duke University **
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.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
Using Decision Sciences Concepts to Think Clearly about Policy Decisions |
Paul Kleindorfer, INSEAD **
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 Tübingen, 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.
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Carolyn Kousky, Resources for the Future **
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.
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David Krantz, Columbia University **
Dr. Krantz graduated from Yale University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1985 and is currently Professor of Psychology and Statistics.
David Krantz is founding Director of Columbia's Center for the Decision Sciences; he has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.
David Krantz's research focuses on problem solving, especially decision making, induction, and math education; applications of axiomatic measurement theory; perception, especially psychophysics, and color vision. He has published extensively on these issues and is the author or co-authors of 6 books.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
The Irrational Economist and the Quest for Rationality |
Howard Kunreuther, The Wharton School**
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 member of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program's Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction; Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, receiving the Society's Distinguished Achievement Award in 2001.
Dr. Kunreuther has written and co-edited numerous books and papers, including On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina , (with Ronald J. Daniels and Donald F. Kettl; 2006), Catastrophe Modeling: A New Approach to Managing Risks (with Patricia Grossi; 2005), and P aying The Price: The State of Natural Disaster Insurance in the United States (with John Roth, Sr.; 1998). 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, IIASA, Austria **
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 Ph.D. 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.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
International Social Protection for Climate-Related Disasters |
Robert Meyer, The Wharton School **
Robert Meyer is the Gayfryd Steinberg Professor and Co-Director of Wharton's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. He is a noted scholar whose research focuses on consumer decision analysis, sales response modeling, and decision making under uncertainty. 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, and currently serves on the editorial review board of several major journals.
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. One of the goals of the risk center is to aid the private and public sectors in developing strategies that allow these biases to be overcome.
Robert Meyer recently completed a six-year term as the Vice Dean of Wharton's doctoral programs. His teaching interests include courses in New Product Management, Research Methods, and Marketing Strategy, which he has taught at the MBA, executive MBA, and doctoral levels. He is also an active participant in a number of Wharton's executive education programs.
Robert Meyer joined the marketing faculty in 1990 after spending eight years on the faculty of the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and two years at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie-Mellon University. He also has served as a visiting professor in the school of economics at the University of Sydney. He received his PhD in Transportation Geography from the University of Iowa in 1980.
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Erwann Michel-Kerjan, The Wharton School **
Erwann Michel-Kerjan is with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches Environmental Sustainability and Value Creation. He is also the Managing Director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, a center with over 20 years of experience in developing strategies and policies for dealing with catastrophic risks. Erwann has studied at or collaborated with McGill, Columbia and Harvard, and joined Wharton in 2002 after he completed his doctoral studies in economics and mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris (at age 26).
In 2007, Dr. Michel-Kerjan was named 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.
His research focuses on managing and financing extreme events, primarily natural disasters and mega-terrorism, optimal catastrophe risk sharing in public-private partnerships, climate change, the economics of national security, energy interdependence and non-proliferation. His work also includes projects on homeland security and critical infrastructure protection in collaboration with the defense industry and several federal agencies. He currently serves as elected chairman of the OECD’s Secretary General High Level Advisory Board on Financial Management of Large-Scale Catastrophes.
He has authored or co-authored more than 40 publications at the crux of financial management and global risk governance, and his views regularly appear in leading media. His first book, Treatise on New Risks (with O. Godard, C. Henry and P. Lagadec), was published by Gallimard in 2002. 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 most recent book Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response, How Private Action Can Reduce Public Vulnerability (with P. Auerswald, L. Branscomb and T. LaPorte, at Harvard and GMU), is the first attempt to analyze the private efficiency-public vulnerability trade-off in the context of extreme event management (Cambridge University Press, 2006; www.SeedsofDisaster.com); his new book At War with the Weather (with H. Kunreuther) will be published in 2009 (MIT Press).
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
Toward a New Risk Architecture: Welcome to Risk Management 2.0 |
David Moss, Harvard University *
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 graduated from Cornell University (B.A., 1986) and went on to earn an M.A. in economics (1988) and a Ph.D. in history (1992) from Yale University. In 1992 and 1993, he served as a senior economist at Abt Associates, a public policy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He joined the Business School faculty in July, 1993.
Professor Moss has published two books: 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). The latter 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. A third book, entitled A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know, is forthcoming in 2007 from the Harvard Business School Press. In addition to these books, Moss has published numerous articles, book chapters, and case studies, mainly in the fields of institutional and policy history, political economy, and comparative social policy.
Professor Moss is a member of the 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.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
The Peculiar Politics of American Disaster Policy |
Robert O'Connor, NSF **
Since 2001 Robert O’Connor has been directing the Decision, Risk and Management Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation. 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 US 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.
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.
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.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
Howard Kunreuther’s Past and The Future of Disaster Research |
Ayse Öncüler, ESSEC **
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. 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. Recently she has been working on ambiguity and probability transformation in intertemporal choice.
| Presentation Title | Abstract |
Mark V. Pauly, Wharton School University of Pennsylvania. **
Mark Pauly currently holds the position of 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 the 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 has made significant contributions to the fields of medical economics and health insurance. His 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. He is currently studying the effect of poor health on worker productivity. Dr. Pauly 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.
He has served on Institute of Medicine panels on public accountability for health insurers under Medicare and on improving the financing of vaccines. Dr. Pauly is a former member of the advisory committee to the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, and most recently a member of the Medicare Technical Advisory Panel.
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John W. Pratt, Harvard *
John W. Pratt, William Ziegler professor of business administration, emeritus, at Harvard Business School, was educated at Princeton and Stanford, specializing in mathematics and statistics. Except for two years at the University of Chicago, and a sabbatical in Kyoto on a Guggenheim fellowship, he spent his entire professional career at Harvard. 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.
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Howard Raiffa, Harvard University *
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. He has also held professorial positions in the Department of Economics and in the Department of Statistics. 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, University of Maryland **
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 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.
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.
Paul J.H. Schoemaker, Decision Strategies International **
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. 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. He has been a regular speaker in the executive programs at Berkeley, Insead (France), Cornell University, UNC and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. 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.
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. He is has also been a Visiting Professor at Cedep/Insead. For over twelve years, he was a professor in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. 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. Later, 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.
His main research interests are in the areas of business strategy, decision sciences, scenario planning, organizational dynamics, and emerging technologies. He has written eight books and over 100 papers which have appeared in journals ranging from the Harvard Business Review and the Journal of Mathematical Psychology to Management Science and 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. Many of his articles have been reprinted and 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 a book.
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Implications of Decision Psychology for Classical Notions of Rationality |
Paul Slovic, University of Oregon **
Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a founder and President of Decision Research. 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 holds a BA from Stanford (1959) and both a M.A (1962) and Ph.D (1964) from the University of Michigan. He has received honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics (1996) and the University of East Anglia (2005).
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Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia *
Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. He is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia.
In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000.
Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macro-economics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D. His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.
Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He founded one of the leading economics journals, The Journal of Economic Perspectives. His book Globalization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton June 2001) has been translated into 35 languages and has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Other recent books include The Roaring Nineties (W.W. Norton), Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics (Cambridge University Press) with Bruce Greenwald, and Fair Trade for All (Oxford University Press), with Andrew Charlton. His newest book, Making Globalization Work, was published by WW Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane in September 2006.
Cass Sunstein, Harvard University Law School *
Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Mr. Sunstein graduated in 1975 from Harvard College and in 1978 from Harvard Law School 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. He was a faculty member at the Law School from 1981 to 2008.
Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, including Ukraine, Poland, China, South Africa, and Russia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Mr. Sunstein has been Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia, visiting professor of law at Harvard, vice-chair of the ABA Committee on Separation of Powers and Governmental Organizations, chair of the Administrative Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the ABA Committee on the future of the FTC, and a member of the President's Advisory Committee on the Public Service Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters.
Mr. Sunstein is author of many articles and a number of books, including Republic.com (2001), Risk and Reason (2002), Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), The Second Bill of Rights (2004), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Worst-Case Scenarios (2001), and Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008). He is now working on various projects involving the relationship between law and human behavior.
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Kip Viscusi, Vanderbilt University Law School *
W. Kip Viscusi is Vanderbilt's first University Distinguished Professor, with primary 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.
His research focuses primarily on individual and societal responses to risk and uncertainty, and he is widely regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on cost-benefit analysis. Professor Viscusi's 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 on issues pertaining to the valuation of life and health. 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 a new journal, Foundations and Trends: Microeconomics.
Before joining the Vanderbilt faculty, Professor Viscusi was the John F. Cogan Jr. Professor of Law and Economics and Director of the Program on Empirical Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He has been the Allen Professor of Economics at Duke University, Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, and the Olin Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.
Richard Zeckhauser, Harvard University **
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 when outcomes that are the product of large number of decentralized individual decisions 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).
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