A Proustian experience with an uncut gem

Before accepting the invitation of the editors of this special issue to comment on Howard Raiffa’s “Preference for multi-attributed alternatives” (Raiffa, 1969, henceforth, HR 69), I much hesitated. Having to comment on an important text that is about forty years old and that has never been published is indeed a difficult exercise, unless you are aware of the story behind its writing and non-publication. I am not. It would be extremely unfair to the author to be critical on a text that was not made widely available at the time it was written. Trying to summarize what has happened in the field since 1969 would be a formidable task requiring far more pages than what the editors have allotted me. Saying that “everything was already there” is not a viable position either. Indeed, if Howard Raiffa did not publish HR 69, we must accept the fact that he had good reasons for that. Furthermore, this would not be fair to the book he published, together with Ralph Keeney, on the same subject several years later (Keeney and Raiffa, 1976). The main reason why I finally accepted the task was that this text reminds me of my early times as a student in a business school: a Proustian experience indeed. ∗ LAMSADE, Universite Paris Dauphine, Place du Marechal de Lattre de Tassigny, F-75775 Paris Cedex 16, France, Tel: +33 1 44 05 48 98, Fax: +33 1 44 05 40 91, e-mail: bouyssou@lamsade.dauphine.fr.