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Barry Nalebuff

Barry Nalebuff

Milton Steinbach Professor of Management

Barry Nalebuff is Milton Steinbach Professor at Yale SOM, where for thirty-four years he has taught negotiation, innovation, strategy, and game theory. He is the coauthor of seven books and an online course. Thinking Strategically and The Art of Strategy are two crossover books on game theory with more than 400,000 copies in print. Co-opetition looks beyond zero-sum games to emphasize the potential for cooperating while competing. Why Not? offers a framework for problem solving and ingenuity. Lifecycle Investing provides a new strategy for retirement investing. Mission in a Bottle tells the story of Honest Tea. His most recent book is Split the Pie, which is based on his negotiation course at SOM. An online version of the negotiation course is available for free on Coursera. It has 600,000 active learners and the second-highest rating on the Coursera platform.

In 1998, Barry—together with his former student Seth Goldman—cofounded Honest Tea. In 2011, the company was purchased by Coca-Cola. His second venture, Kombrewcha, is a slightly alcoholic version of kombucha. The company was acquired by AB-Inbev in 2016. He is currently working with Seth on Just Ice Tea.

He works with many entrepreneurial firms. He has served on the board of Q Drinks (started by his former student Jordan Silbert), Calicraft Beer, Eat the Change, and AGP Glass. Alongside startups, he served on the board of Nationwide Insurance and has extensive experience consulting with multinational firms. He advises the NBA in their negotiations with the National Basketball Players Association. A graduate of MIT, a Rhodes Scholar, and a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, Nalebuff earned his doctorate at Oxford University.

Education

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

Articles

Working Papers

Achievements

  • Writing Award (for "Exclusionary Bundling" article), Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund, 2005
  • Miegunyah Fellowship, University of Melbourne, 1998
  • Sloan Fellowship, 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