Professor David Bell
Professor David E. Bell is the George M. Moffett Professor of Agriculture and Business at Harvard Business School. Currently he is teaching the MBA Leadership and Corporate Accountability course (LCA). He chairs the annual Agribusiness Seminar that attracts 200 food industry executives from around the world to discuss trends in the industry.
For several years he chaired the school’s ten-week executive education course programme for management development (PMD). Following six years as head of the school’s Marketing Department he is now Senior Associate Dean with responsibilities including faculty recruiting.
Areas of Specialisation
In agribusiness, David is interested in all aspects of the food system, but especially the demand side of the food chain: how eating habits are changing, both with respect to what people eat and the channels through which they choose to buy food.
During his thirty years on the faculty he has taught courses on managerial economics, risk management, marketing, retailing and agribusiness at both MBA and executive levels.
Areas of Research
David’s area of research include Store location with pricing strategy, Market Retailing, E-tailing, Customer value analysis, Risk Management and Managerial Decision Analysis
Selected Publications
With Arthur Schleifer Jr., David has produced four books in a series called Managerial Decision Analysis for Course Technology Inc. The books are Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Data Analysis, Regression and Forecasting, Risk Management and Decision Making Under Certainty. His research in this area has centred mostly around the analysis of risk.
Most recently he has published a series of papers dealing with the integration of economic and financial theories of risk. His best-known papers are concerned with the incorporation of psychological aspects of risk taking, such as regret and disappointment, into formal decision making systems. He was awarded the 2001 Ramsey Medal by the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS. Since 2005 he has been the Department Editor for Decision Analysis for Management Science.
Along with his co-author, Walter J. Salmon, David has written two books on retailing, Strategic Retail Management and Introduction to Retailing.
