Howard Kunreuther was a prime example of the importance of thinking beyond the boundaries of one’s own discipline.
Howard became my PhD advisor at Wharton in 1975 and later a good friend when we began meeting at his home in Narberth, near Philadelphia, to discuss our research. After work, we would usually have a light lunch with his wife and then play a fierce tennis match on a nearby public court. Howard was left-handed, had a devilish forehand down the line and played a superb baseline tennis game; he kept risk and return optimally balanced, even in tennis. He seemed unaffected by the heuristics and biases that plague most amateur players. I would characterize our matches as Howard being the constant and I the variable, with uncertain outcomes as a result.
Thanks to a graduate seminar Howard taught on decision making, I read a working paper by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky two years before it was published in Econometrics and became famous. Howard’s graduate program also included many other important behavioral studies on risk-taking. This timely exposure to emerging behavioral decision research changed my own doctoral career from finance to decision science. My doctoral thesis on risk-taking, written under Howard’s supervision, landed me a faculty position at the University of Chicago and its Center for Decision Research. This groundbreaking center within the business school is currently headed by Richard Thaler, who won a Nobel Prize in behavioral economics, just as Kahneman did a few years earlier for his remarkable work with Tversky. Howard knew all of these gifted scholars personally thanks to his own highly regarded research on earthquake and flood insurance risk, as well as his very collaborative and positive attitude.
As I got to know Howard better personally, I found him to be an inspiring and insightful scientist who ventured fearlessly into behavioral science, far ahead of other, more rationally oriented scientists. One of his special gifts was his ability to build personal connections with researchers in a variety of disciplines while working with a wide range of practitioners. For example, when I wanted to expand my doctoral surveys on risk tolerance beyond Wharton students, Howard kindly introduced me to a business contact who ran an insurance agency and generously allowed me to send my risk survey to all of their clients. One result of this fieldwork was that most clients were over-insured relative to their own risk tolerance, confirming the adage that insurance is sold, not bought. But we didn’t want to make a big deal about it, so we just reported these results matter-of-factly with Howard in the Journal of Risk and Insurance. Wharton Professor John Hershey later joined our research branch and helped us publish additional results in Management Science about the limitations of , which was a leading model at the time.
Later, when I settled at the University of Chicago, Howard and I, along with our friend and gifted colleague Paul Kleindorfer, decided to write a graduate textbook. We wanted to cover the field of decision science from four perspectives: individual, group, organizational, and societal. Although it took us far too long to complete the book—ten years in all—we enjoyed it and were intellectually stimulated as we attempted to synthesize the complex, evolving decision field from descriptive, normative, and finally prescriptive perspectives. I fondly remember our summer meeting in Austria in 1982, when Howard led a risk analysis group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) studying LNG siting decisions. The institute was housed in Laxenburg Castle, just outside Vienna, and served as an interdisciplinary academic center to promote detente. The institute also had the blessing of then-US President Ronald Reagan and the rising Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a time when nuclear power and nuclear weapons were central issues. I enjoyed meeting scientists of different backgrounds and ideologies at IIASA, although I sometimes wondered whether some of the Soviet academics there were scientists, spies, both, or neither.
Paul Kleindorfer also joined us at IIASA to finish our book and enjoy Vienna, especially since Paul was fluent in German and I, being Dutch, was passable. Howard was not at all intimidated—he just chatted freely with us in his broken German. As our book began to take shape, we tested preliminary sections and exercises with Wharton students in Howard’s Decision Science course. The students were asked to examine their own decision-making using personal examples they were dealing with at the time. Some of these were excellent illustrations of important points in our book, so we added some of them to our final chapter with their permission. Finally, our 470-page book was published by Cambridge Press in 1993. We were fortunate to receive generous book recommendations from such esteemed colleagues as Herbert Simon, Max Bazerman, Baruch Fischhoff, and Ralph Keeney, reflecting Howard’s many deep and personal connections as well as those of Paul Kleindorfer.
What I particularly admired about Howard was that he saw new research opportunities in almost any real-world problem that could be posed, which made him an exceptional academic cross-borderer. He was well-read in several disciplines and admired, for example, Mary Douglas’s work on risk in anthropology and Jürgen Habermas’s views on legitimacy in sociology and philosophy.
Nor did I ever detect any hint of intellectual imperialism in Howard, who believed that his own academic disciplines were superior to others. He had started out as an MIT graduate majoring in economics and operations research while working under Ned Bowman, but over time he became more behaviorally and real-world-oriented, perhaps anticipating his own doctoral dissertation on using managerial bootstrapping to optimally assign employees to routine jobs.
I find this behavioral-normative duality in Howard’s research to be an endearing and important feature. His intellectual tolerance and curiosity were well described in a 2010 Festschrift in Howard’s honor, which bore the apt title: The irrational economistedited by Paul Slovic and Erwann Michel-Kerjan. Many distinguished scientists contributed chapters, including Nobel laureates George Akerlof, Kenneth Arrow, Tom Schelling, and Robert Shiller, as well as luminaries such as Colin Camerer, Howard Raffa, Paul Slovic, and Cass Sunstein. Howard himself wrote the concluding chapter, reflecting on his six-decade career. Howard enjoyed combining behavioral and rational perspectives in his groundbreaking research on decisions about low-probability events whose impacts could be enormous for individuals, groups, organizations, or society at large, such as nuclear power.
Although I only published three academic articles with Howard, I treasured each of them, as well as our graduate-level book with Paul Kleindorfer. Howard embodied the values of thinking outside the boundaries of one’s own field, remaining open to opposing views from other academic fields, and also fully respecting real-world experiences. I will miss his infectious enthusiasm, spontaneous generosity, and gentle soul. To me and many others who knew Howard personally, he was an intellectual gem and a very kind person to boot. I was privileged to have known him as a friend as well as a co-author and scholar.
