Richard F. Meyer

Richard F. Meyer

Thomas D. Casserly, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus

Thomas D. Casserly, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus

Richard F. Meyer is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Professor Meyer received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and spent the first ten years of his career in the Management Services Division of Arthur D. Little, Inc., serving as a consultant to major corporations both in the U.S. and in Europe. He has been on the faculty of the Harvard Business School since 1965, except for a year as Associate Dean for Research at INSEAD, France. At Harvard he has held a number of administrative positions, including Chairman of the Admissions Policy Committee and Chairman of the Managerial Economics Area.
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Richard F. Meyer
Contact Information
(617) 495-6273
Publications Research Summary
Financial Risk Management
Richard F. Meyer is exploring the theory and practice of financial risk management in corporations worldwide. Three primary objectives of his research are: to understand the underlying sources of risk and corporations' exposure to them; to identify appropriate, available mechanisms for managing risk; and to develop consistent risk-management strategies for various levels of risk tolerance. Meyer's work is aimed in part at the development of teaching materials for Financial Risk Management, an MBA course for which he is also producing a book of text and cases. His essay "Upside Opportunity and Downside Risk" is included in Wise Choices: Decisions, Games, and Negotiations, published by the Harvard Business School Press.

Richard F. Meyer is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Professor Meyer received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and spent the first ten years of his career in the Management Services Division of Arthur D. Little, Inc., serving as a consultant to major corporations both in the U.S. and in Europe. He has been on the faculty of the Harvard Business School since 1965, except for a year as Associate Dean for Research at INSEAD, France. At Harvard he has held a number of administrative positions, including Chairman of the Admissions Policy Committee and Chairman of the Managerial Economics Area.

In recent years, Professor Meyer has been teaching and doing research in Financial Risk Management, Negotiation, and Competitive Strategy. During the Fall of '97 he taught Financial Risk Management in the second year of the MBA program and in the Spring of '98 he taught Negotiation to first year MBA students. His current research and course development focuses on the use of derivatives to hedge financial risk in corporations.

Professor Meyer is a fellow of the Operations Research Society of America, a member of the Strategic Management Society, and has published numerous papers in operations research, decision analysis, utility theory, financial economics, and the application of computers in Operations Research, Naval Research, Logistics Quarterly, Information and Control, ASME Transactions, The Journal of Financial Economics, et al. He has lectured extensively on these subjects, and continues active in industrial consulting and research. He has participated in a number of pioneering applications of computers to business problems, including service order handling at Michigan Bell Telephone; the reservations system of American Airlines; and one of the first fully integrated multi-location invoicing, inventory control, and production scheduling systems at DuPont. More recently, Professor Meyer has concentrated on applications in long-term planning under uncertainty and risk management. He was a member of the U.S. Presidentis Space Task Force, which advised the President on U.S. Space policy and is co-author (with R. Bauer) of NASA Planning and Decision Making, Vol. I and II. He has participated in a number of corporate venture analysis and strategic planning projects, has worked on airline fleet planning and on commodity and foreign exchange risk management. In the public sector, he has been a consultant to the United States Railway Association and one of their principal witnesses in the Penn Central Valuation proceedings.

Professor Meyer has served on a number of boards, and is currently Chairman of New England Digital Distribution, a telecommunications company, and a director of NV Ahold, one of the world's major retailing firms, represented in the U.S. through five large supermarket chains. In the public sector, he has been a member of the Presidents Space Task Force and the Pennsylvania Pension Fund Commission, and is Vice Chairman of the United Way of Massachusetts Bay.

Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Meyer, Richard F. "Upside Opportunity and Downside Risk." In Wise Choices: Decisions, Games, and Negotiations, edited by Richard Zeckhauser, Ralph Keeney, and James Sebenius. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996. View Details
Cases and Teaching Materials
Research Summary
Financial Risk Management
Richard F. Meyer is exploring the theory and practice of financial risk management in corporations worldwide. Three primary objectives of his research are: to understand the underlying sources of risk and corporations' exposure to them; to identify appropriate, available mechanisms for managing risk; and to develop consistent risk-management strategies for various levels of risk tolerance. Meyer's work is aimed in part at the development of teaching materials for Financial Risk Management, an MBA course for which he is also producing a book of text and cases. His essay "Upside Opportunity and Downside Risk" is included in Wise Choices: Decisions, Games, and Negotiations, published by the Harvard Business School Press.