Go to main content
Harvard Business School
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions

Faculty & Research

  • HOME
  • FACULTY
  • RESEARCH
    • Global Research Centers
    • HBS Case Collection
    • HBS Case Development
    • Initiatives & Projects
    • Publications
    • Research Associate (RA) Positions
    • Research Services
    • Seminars & Conferences
    Close
  • FEATURED TOPICS
    • Business and Environment
    • Business History
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Finance
    • Globalization
    • Health Care
    • Human Behavior and Decision-Making
    • Leadership
    • Social Enterprise
    • Technology and Innovation
    Close
  • ACADEMIC UNITS
    • Accounting and Management
    • Business, Government and the International Economy
    • Entrepreneurial Management
    • Finance
    • General Management
    • Marketing
    • Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
    • Organizational Behavior
    • Strategy
    • Technology and Operations Management
    Close
Photo of John W. Pratt

Contact:

(617) 495-6244

Send Email

John W. Pratt

William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus

Print Entire ProfileMore

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.

Print Entire ProfileLess
Publications

Books

  1. Book | 2008

    Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory

    John W. Pratt, Howard Raiffa and Robert Schlaifer

    Citation:

    Pratt, John W., Howard Raiffa, and Robert Schlaifer. Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory. Paperback ed. MIT Press, 2008.  View Details
    CiteView Details Related
  2. Book | 1995

    Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory

    John W. Pratt, Howard Raiffa and Robert Schlaifer

    Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Decision Making; Theory;

    Citation:

    Pratt, John W., Howard Raiffa, and Robert Schlaifer. Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory. MIT Press, 1995.  View Details
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
  3. Book | 1991

    Principals and Agents: The Structure of Business

    John W. Pratt and Richard Zeckhauser

    Keywords: Organizational Structure;

    Citation:

    Pratt, John W. and Richard Zeckhauser, eds. Principals and Agents: The Structure of Business. Harvard Business School Press, 1991.  View Details
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related

Journal Articles

  1. Article | Journal of Risk and Uncertainty

    Fair (and Not So Fair) Division

    John W. Pratt

    Drawbacks of existing procedures are illustrated and a method of efficient fair division is proposed that avoids them. Given additive participants' utilities, each item is priced at the geometric mean (or some other function) of its two highest valuations. The utilities are scaled so that the market clears with the participants' purchases proportional to their entitlements. The method is generalized to arbitrary bargaining sets and existence is proved. For two or three participants, the expected utilities are unique. For more, under additivity, the geometric mean separates the prices where uniqueness holds and where it fails; it holds for the geometric mean except in one case where refinement is needed.

    Keywords: Price; Management Practices and Processes; Valuation;

    Citation:

    Pratt, John W. "Fair (and Not So Fair) Division." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 35, no. 3 (December 2007).  View Details
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
  2. Article | Journal of Risk and Uncertainty

    How Many Balance Functions Does It Take To Determine A Utility Function?

    John W. Pratt

    Citation:

    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
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
  3. Article | Management Science

    Efficient Risk Sharing: The Last Frontier

    John W. Pratt

    Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty;

    Citation:

    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
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
  4. Article | American Statistician

    A New Interpretation of the F Statistic

    John W. Pratt and Robert Schlaifer

    Citation:

    Pratt, John W., and Robert Schlaifer. "A New Interpretation of the F Statistic." American Statistician 52, no. 2 (May 1998): 141–143.  View Details
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
  5. Article | Journal of Risk and Uncertainty

    Increasing Risk: Some Direct Constructions

    John W. Pratt and Mark J. Machina

    Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty;

    Citation:

    Pratt, John W., and Mark J. Machina. "Increasing Risk: Some Direct Constructions." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 14 (1997): 103–127.  View Details
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
  6. Article | Journal of Political Economy

    Willingness to Pay and the Distribution of Risk and Wealth

    John W. Pratt and Richard Zeckhauser

    Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Wealth;

    Citation:

    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
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
  7. Article | Mathematics of Operations Research

    The Contraction Mapping Approach to the Perron-Frobenius Theory: Why Hilbert's Metric?

    Elon Kohlberg and John W. Pratt

    Keywords: Theory; Measurement and Metrics;

    Citation:

    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
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
  8. Article | Journal of Finance

    Evaluating and Comparing Projects: Simple Detection of False Alarms

    John S. Hammond and John W. Pratt

    Keywords: Performance Evaluation;

    Citation:

    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
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related

Working Papers

  1. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2008

    Some Neglected Axioms in Fair Division

    John W. Pratt

    Conditions one might impose on fair allocation procedures are introduced. Nondiscrimination requires that agents share an item in proportion to their entitlements if they receive nothing else. The "price" procedures of Pratt (2007), including the Nash bargaining procedure, satisfy this. Other prominent efficient procedures do not. In two-agent problems, reducing the feasible set between the solution and one agent's maximum point increases the utility cost to that agent of providing any given utility gain to the other and is equivalent to decreasing the dispersion of the latter's values for the items he does not receive without changing their total. One-agent monotonicity requires that such a change should not hurt the first agent, limited monotonicity that the solution should not change. For prices, the former implies convexity in the smaller of the two valuations, the latter linearity. In either case, the price is at least their average and hence spiteful.

    Keywords: Resource Allocation; Valuation; Price; Cost;

    Citation:

    Pratt, John W. "Some Neglected Axioms in Fair Division." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-094, May 2008.  View Details
    CiteView Details Read Now Related
  2. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2007

    Correlated Equilibrium and Nash Equilibrium as an Observer's Assessment of the Game

    John Hillas, Elon Kohlberg and John W. Pratt

    Noncooperative games are examined from the point of view of an outside observer who believes that the players are rational and that they know at least as much as the observer. The observer is assumed to be able to observe many instances of the play of the game; these instances are identical in the sense that the observer cannot distinguish between the settings in which different plays occur. If the observer does not believe that he will be able to offer beneficial advice then he must believe that the players are playing a correlated equilibrium, though he may not initially know which correlated equilibrium. If the observer also believes that, in a certain sense, there is nothing connecting the players in a particular instance of the game then he must believe that the correlated equilibrium they are playing is, in fact, a Nash equilibrium.

    Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Game Theory; Cooperation;

    Citation:

    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
    CiteView Details Read Now Related

Cases and Teaching Materials

  1. Case | HBS Case Collection | January 1971 (Revised March 1992)

    Rubicon Rubber Co.

    John W. Pratt

    Keywords: Rubber Industry;

    Citation:

    Pratt, John W. "Rubicon Rubber Co." Harvard Business School Case 171-330, January 1971. (Revised March 1992.)  View Details
    CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard Related
Search all publications by John W. Pratt »
ǁ
Campus Map
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→ Map & Directions
→ More Contact Information
→ More Contact Information
→ More Contact Information
→ More Contact Information
  • HBS Facebook
  • Alumni Facebook
  • Executive Education Facebook
  • Michael Porter Facebook
  • Working Knowledge Facebook
  • HBS Twitter
  • Executive Education Twitter
  • HBS Alumni Twitter
  • Michael Porter Twitter
  • Recruiting Twitter
  • Rock Center Twitter
  • Working Knowledge Twitter
  • Jobs Twitter
  • HBS Youtube
  • Michael Porter Youtube
  • Executive Education Youtube
  • HBS Linkedin
  • Alumni Linkedin
  • Executive Education Linkedin
  • MBA Linkedin
  • Linkedin
  • HBS Instagram
  • Alumni Instagram
  • Executive Education Instagram
  • Michael Porter Instagram
  • HBS iTunes
  • Executive Education iTunes
  • HBS Tumblr
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Privacy
  • Terms of Use
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College