David E. Bell is the George M. Moffett Professor of Agriculture and Business at Harvard Business School and chair of the school’s marketing faculty.
David is an expert on decision analysis and risk management. He has published many papers on utility theory, the best-known being on regret as a psychological aspect of risk taking. In recognition of his research, he was awarded the Ramsey Medal in 2001, the George Cantor award in 2015, and elected as an INFORMS Fellow in 2011. He has held many editorial positions in decision analysis for both Operations Research and Management Science.
During over 40 years on the HBS faculty, David has taught a variety of courses to both MBAs and executives, including marketing, retailing, risk management, ethics, and managerial economics. He is currently teaching marketing in the school’s Advanced Management Program.
Prof. Bell runs the annual Agribusiness Seminar for executives and has taught an MBA course on the same topic. He studies all aspects of the food chain, from farming to distribution to trends in consumer eating habits.
He has held a number of administrative positions at HBS including head of the Program for Management Development (PMD, 2002-6), terms as chairman of the School’s marketing faculty (2002-8, 2013-) and as Senior Associate Dean for Planning and Recruiting (2008-12, 2016-18).
David has degrees in mathematics from Oxford University (BA, 1971) and MIT (PhD, 1973). Outside HBS, David is an active speaker and consultant. He currently serves as an advisor to Paine Schwartz Partners, and as a director of Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation.
We introduce a variety of new independence conditions for multiattribute utility functions that permit preference dependencies among the attributes of a decision problem. The hierarchy of new conditions varies in the degree to which it specifies the functional form, ranging from more general solutions with weaker constraints, to more specific solutions with stronger constraints. This formulation provides a wealth of new functional forms that a decision maker may use in a multiattribute decision problem.
In 2015, COFCO, China's state-owned agribusiness giant, was working to protect China's food security (a key national security priority) by extending its control of the global food system through overseas acquisitions. At the same time, COFCO sought to grow its market share in China's fiercely competitive branded foods market. To help achieve these goals, COFCO Chairman Frank Ning was driving internal reforms to make COFCO's management more competitive, innovative, and globally experienced. This case allows for a discussion of the Chinese marketplace and the evolving approach to business structures taken by the Chinese government. COFCO is the leading food company in China, and we can see through the case the hurdles faced in transitioning a company from pursuing mostly social objectives to mostly profit making. Finally, the case is a useful vehicle for discussing the question of whether and how China can feed itself. Efficient and reliable sourcing of food from abroad is evidently an increasing, and urgent, priority.
Louis Dreyfus Commodities (LDC or Dreyfus) is the D of the ABCD grain-trading giants. The case describes how their business works and details the strategy by which management turned the company around in recent years. The case presents a number of issues facing the company: a sense of volatility in grain markets is getting lower, recent attempts by China to forward-integrate into grain procurement, and changes in ownership. A related question is the degree to which they should emphasize pure trading or participate in value-added activities.
