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Milton Steinbach Professor of Management

Barry Nalebuff is an expert on game theory and has written extensively on its application to business strategy. He is the coauthor of six books: Thinking Strategically and The Art of Strategy are two popular books on game theory with over 300,000 copies in print. In Co-opetition, Nalebuff looks beyond zero-sum games to emphasize the potential for cooperating as well as competing. In Why Not?, he and Ian Ayres provide a framework for problem solving and ingenuity. Lifecycle Investing provides a new strategy for retirement investing. His forthcoming book, Mission in a Bottle, tells the story of Honest Tea in comic book format. A graduate of MIT, a Rhodes Scholar, and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Nalebuff earned his doctorate at Oxford University.

In addition to his academic work, he has extensive experience consulting with multinational firms, from American Express, GE, and McKinsey to Google and Rio Tinto. He advised the NBA in their negotiations with the National Basketball Players Association and serves on the board of Nationwide Insurance. In 1998, Barry together with one of his former students, Seth Goldman, cofounded Honest Tea, a company that sells ready-to-drink iced tea that truly tastes like tea. It is one of Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing companies and has grown (organically) from $0 to $70 million in sales. In 2011, Coca-Cola purchased the company.

Achievements and Awards
Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award (for "Exclusionary Bundling" article), 2005
Miegunyah Fellowship, University of Melbourne, 1998
Sloan Fellowship, 1989-1991
Bicentennial Preceptorship, Princeton University, 1989-1991
Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1982-1985
Rhodes Scholar, Massachusetts and Nuffield College, 1980-1982

Directorships

Honest Tea (Chairman, Co-founder)
Nationwide Mutual

Editorships
Associate Editor:
Journal of Conflict Resolution
Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization

Books
The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life (with A. Dixit), W. W. Norton, 2008

Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small (with I. Ayres), Harvard Business School Press, 2003. Translations in Bulgarian, Chinese, Estonian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese.

Co-opetition (with A. Brandenburger), Currency/Doubleday, 1996. Translations in Bahasa, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics and Everyday Life (with A. Dixit), W.W. Norton, 1991. Translations in Chinese, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Economics for an Imperfect World : Essays in Honor of Joseph E. Stiglitz (with R. Arnott, B. Greenwald, and R. Kanbur, eds.), MIT Press, 2003

Selected Book Chapters
"Bundling: GE-Honeywell (2001)" in The Antitrust Revolution, 4th edition,  in J. Kwoka and L. White, eds., Oxford University Press, 388–412, 2004. Also in 5th edition, 416–440, 2009

"Competing Against Bundles," in Incentives, Organization, and Public Economics, in P. Hammond and G. Myles, eds., Oxford University Press, 2000

Selected Articles
"Exclusionary Bundling" The Antitrust Bulletin, Vol. 50, No. 3, 321-370, 2005 

"Bundling as an Entry Barrier" Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 119, No. 1, 159-188, 2004 

"An Introduction to Vote Counting Schemes" (with J. Levin), Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 9, No. 1, 3-26, 1995

"The Right Game: Use Game Theory to Shape Strategy" (with A. Brandenburger), Harvard Business Review, Vol. 73, No. 4, 57-71, 1995 

Education
PhD Oxford University
MPhil Oxford University
SB Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
SB Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Related Links

Barry Nalebuff's website.
The Art of Strategy
Co-opetition
Why Not?
Honest Tea
Forbes Why Not? columns
Marketplace audio segments
Flipping It