About

Richard Zeckhauser is the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School. He graduated from Harvard College with summa cum laude honors and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society, the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Sciences), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. His contributions to decision theory and behavioral economics include the development of concepts such as quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), status quo bias, betrayal aversion, and the role of ignorance—states of the world unknown—as a complement to the categories of risk and uncertainty. Many of his policy investigations explore ways to promote human health, improve market functioning, and foster informed and appropriate decision-making by individuals and government agencies. Zeckhauser has published over 330 articles and 14 books and edited volumes, with recent works including collaborations on topics such as public-private collaboration in China and the United States, Renaissance art markets, and governance. Beyond academia, he is a Senior Principal at Equity Resource Investments, a real estate private equity firm. He has also won multiple national championships in contract bridge.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economics
• Geography
• Business
• Microeconomics
• Monetary economics
• Industrial organization
• Finance
• Law

Selected publications

• Strategic Information Asceticism: Denying Self to Deny Others

  Research Square · 2026-04-06

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Granular feedback merits sophisticated aggregation

  ArXiv.org · 2025-07-16

  preprintOpen access

  Human feedback is increasingly used across diverse applications like training AI models, developing recommender systems, and measuring public opinion -- with granular feedback often being preferred over binary feedback for its greater informativeness. While it is easy to accurately estimate a population's distribution of feedback given feedback from a large number of individuals, cost constraints typically necessitate using smaller groups. A simple method to approximate the population distribution is regularized averaging: compute the empirical distribution and regularize it toward a prior. Can we do better? As we will discuss, the answer to this question depends on feedback granularity. Suppose one wants to predict a population's distribution of feedback using feedback from a limited number of individuals. We show that, as feedback granularity increases, one can substantially improve upon predictions of regularized averaging by combining individuals' feedback in ways more sophisticated than regularized averaging. Our empirical analysis using questions on social attitudes confirms this pattern. In particular, with binary feedback, sophistication barely reduces the number of individuals required to attain a fixed level of performance. By contrast, with five-point feedback, sophisticated methods match the performance of regularized averaging with about half as many individuals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Managed Expectations Theory: Ex ante likelihoods influence ex post utilities

  Journal of Risk and Uncertainty · 2025-08-01

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract Daniel Kahneman, often in collaboration with Amos Tversky, developed foundational frameworks for understanding human decision-making. Building on that tradition, this article proposes that individuals’ ex ante assessments of the likelihood of good and bad outcomes serve as reference points that shape the ex post utility of lottery outcomes. In prospect theory, prior holdings act as reference points for evaluating outcomes—but probabilities themselves play no such role. This article introduces Managed Expectations Theory , which rests on two core hypotheses: Reference Point Hypothesis : Ex ante probabilities serve as reference points for ex post utility. Specifically, more pessimistic expectations about uncertain outcomes enhance ex post utility, regardless of whether the outcome turns out to be good or bad. Four experiments, using a nationally representative adult sample of over 1,000 participants, strongly support this hypothesis. Lower [higher] ex ante likelihoods are associated with greater ex post utility for good [bad] outcomes. Created Likelihoods Hypothesis : Recognizing that likelihood assessments act as reference points, individuals deliberately manage these assessments to be more pessimistic than an objective or statistical “outside view”—in order to boost their ex post utilities. Supporting this conjecture, the good outcomes participants labeled as “likely” occurred far more often than the bad outcomes they labeled as “likely.” These created likelihoods help explain a central feature of prospect theory’s probability weighting function: the underestimation of high-probability good events and the overestimation of low-probability bad events.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Managed Expectations Theory: Ex Ante Likelihoods Influence Ex Post Utilities Faculty Research Working Paper Series

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Strategy Is Only Partly an Illusion: “Relative Foresight” as an Objective Standard for Evaluating Foreign Policy Competence

  Foreign Policy Analysis · 2024-04-27 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Foreign policymakers must grapple with complexity, uncertainty, and subjectivity. These challenges raise the possibility that “strategy is an illusion”: that there is no reliable method for assessing skill at managing international politics. By contrast, we show that researchers can objectively evaluate a critical component of foreign policy competence using a standard we call “relative foresight,” defined as decision-makers’ ability to anticipate consequences of their choices as compared to alternative views based on similar information. Relative foresight can be measured without relying on value judgments or subjective probabilities. By contrast, other common frameworks for gauging foreign policy competence, such as comparing leaders’ behavior to the rational actor model or assessing procedural rationality, almost always leave room for reasonable disagreement. We demonstrate that relative foresight provides a useful tool for evaluating major foreign policy choices through case studies of Barack Obama’s decisions regarding the Afghan Surge and the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Our framework has broad implications for research on normative, prescriptive, and descriptive dimensions of foreign policy analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• Strategy Is Only Partly an Illusion: 'Relative Foresight' as an Objective Standard for Evaluating Foreign Policy Competence

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Risks in Renaissance Art

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-01-11 · 10 citations

  bookOpen accessSenior author

  This Element represents the first systematic study of the risks borne by those who produced, commissioned, and purchased art, across Renaissance Europe. It employs a new methodology, built around concepts from risk analysis and decision theory. The Element classifies scores of documented examples of losses into 'production risks', which arise from the conception of a work of art until its final placement, and 'reception risks', when a patron, a buyer, or viewer finds a work displeasing, inappropriate, or offensive. Significant risks must be tamed before players undertake transactions. The Element discusses risk-taming mechanisms operating society-wide: extensive communication flows, social capital, and trust, and the measures individual participants took to reduce the likelihood and consequences of losses. Those mechanisms were employed in both the patronage-based system and the modern open markets, which predominated respectively in Southern and Northern Europe.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adaptive Crowdsourcing Via Self-Supervised Learning

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-01-24

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Common crowdsourcing systems average estimates of a latent quantity of interest provided by many crowdworkers to produce a group estimate. We develop a new approach -- predict-each-worker -- that leverages self-supervised learning and a novel aggregation scheme. This approach adapts weights assigned to crowdworkers based on estimates they provided for previous quantities. When skills vary across crowdworkers or their estimates correlate, the weighted sum offers a more accurate group estimate than the average. Existing algorithms such as expectation maximization can, at least in principle, produce similarly accurate group estimates. However, their computational requirements become onerous when complex models, such as neural networks, are required to express relationships among crowdworkers. Predict-each-worker accommodates such complexity as well as many other practical challenges. We analyze the efficacy of predict-each-worker through theoretical and computational studies. Among other things, we establish asymptotic optimality as the number of engagements per crowdworker grows.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Playing Divide-and-Choose Given Uncertain Preferences

  Management Science · 2024-11-25

  articleSenior author

  We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions of those values are common knowledge. We consider both the cases of independent values and values that are correlated across players (as occurs when there is a common-value component). We describe the structure of optimal divisions in the divide-and-choose game and identify several cases where it is possible to efficiently compute equilibria. An approximation algorithm is presented for the case when the distribution over the chooser’s value for each good follows a normal distribution, along with a randomized approximation algorithm for the case of uniform distributions over intervals. A mixture of analytic results and computational simulations illuminates several striking differences between optimal strategies in the cases of known versus unknown preferences. Most notably, given unknown preferences, the divider has a compelling “diversification” incentive in creating the chooser’s two options. This incentive leads to multiple goods being divided at equilibrium, quite contrary to the divider’s optimal strategy when preferences are known. In many contexts, such as buy-and-sell provisions between partners, or in judging fairness, it is important to assess the relative expected utilities of the divider and chooser. Those utilities, we show, depend on the players’ levels of knowledge about each other’s values, the correlations between the players’ values, and the number of goods being divided. Under fairly mild assumptions, we show that the chooser is strictly better off for a small number of goods, whereas the divider is strictly better off for a large number of goods. This paper was accepted by Ilia Tsetlin, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard University, and the National Science Foundation [Grant DGE1745303]. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material reflect the views of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Science Foundation or the Mossavar-Rahmani Center. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00350 .

  PublisherDOI

• Deterrence games and the disruption of information

  International Journal of Game Theory · 2023-08-18 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R03HS013362

  NIH · $93k · 2005

Frequent coauthors

• Alexander F. Wagner

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  130 shared

• W. Kip Viscusi

  103 shared

• Alexandre Ziegler

  University of Zurich

  64 shared

• David Cutler

  Harvard University

  51 shared

• Gernot Wagner

  49 shared

• Mark Freeman

  43 shared

• Jayendu Patel

  Harvard University

  40 shared

• Nolan Miller

  39 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the Econometric Society
• Fellow of the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Sci…
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association (2…