John W. Pratt

John W. Pratt is a professor of business administration, emeritus, at Harvard Business School. He 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, Pratt has been at Harvard for his entire professional career. Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association from 1965 to 1970, he is a fellow of five professional societies and has chaired National Academy of Sciences committees on environmental monitoring, census methodology, and the future of statistics. His recent research has been on risk aversion, risk sharing incentives, and the nature and discovery of stochastic laws, statistical relationships that describe the effects of decisions. He is co-author of a book entitled: Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory, published by MIT Press, 1995.

Books

• Pratt, John W., Howard Raiffa, and Robert Schlaifer. Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory. Paperback ed. MIT Press, 2008. View Details
• Pratt, John W., Howard Raiffa, and Robert Schlaifer. Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory. MIT Press, 1995. View Details
• Pratt, John W. and Richard Zeckhauser, eds. Principals and Agents: The Structure of Business. Harvard Business School Press, 1991. View Details

Journal Articles

• Pratt, John W. "Fair (and Not So Fair) Division." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 35, no. 3 (December 2007). View Details
• Pratt, John W. "How Many Balance Functions Does It Take To Determine A Utility Function?" Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 31, no. 2 (September 2005): 109–127. (Article in Honor of Paul Samuelson's 90th Birthday.) View Details
• Pratt, John W. "Efficient Risk Sharing: The Last Frontier." Management Science 46, no. 12 (December 2000): 1545–1553. (Japanese version, translated by Fumiko Seo, in Modeling and Decision Making in Ambiguous Environments, Fumiko Seo and Takao Fukuchi, eds., 2002 (Kyoto U. Press).) View Details
• Pratt, John W., and Robert Schlaifer. "A New Interpretation of the F Statistic." American Statistician 52, no. 2 (May 1998): 141–143. View Details
• Pratt, John W., and Mark J. Machina. "Increasing Risk: Some Direct Constructions." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 14 (1997): 103–127. View Details
• Pratt, John W., and Richard Zeckhauser. "Willingness to Pay and the Distribution of Risk and Wealth." Journal of Political Economy 104 (August 1996): 747–763. View Details
• Kohlberg, Elon, and John W. Pratt. "The Contraction Mapping Approach to the Perron-Frobenius Theory: Why Hilbert's Metric?" Mathematics of Operations Research, no. 7 (1982): 198–210. View Details
• Hammond, John S., and John W. Pratt. "Evaluating and Comparing Projects: Simple Detection of False Alarms." Journal of Finance 34, no. 5 (December 1979): 1231–1242. View Details

Working Papers

• Pratt, John W. "Some Neglected Axioms in Fair Division." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-094, May 2008. View Details
• Hillas, John, Elon Kohlberg, and John W. Pratt. "Correlated Equilibrium and Nash Equilibrium as an Observer's Assessment of the Game." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-005, July 2007. View Details

Cases and Teaching Materials

• Pratt, John W. "Rubicon Rubber Co." Harvard Business School Case 171-330, January 1971. (Revised March 1992.) View Details