Decision Analysis Society Awards Professor Emeritus Samuel Bodily Its Highest Honor

Samuel E. Bodily, the John Tyler Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business, has been named the 2024 recipient of the Frank P. Ramsey medal for distinguished contributions in decision analysis.

Awarded annually by the Decision Analysis Society, contributions that earn the medal can be internal, such as theoretical or procedural advances in decision analysis, or external, such as developing or spreading decision analysis in new fields.

The society is a unit of INFORMS, described as the largest professional association for decision and data sciences.

The society said the award is in recognition of Bodily’s “many years of contribution to the teaching, research and practice of decision analysis.”

“He is the founding father of the Quantitative Analysis area at UVA Darden and his contributions to the teaching, research and practice of decision analysis have had a profound and worldwide impact on the way we teach, research and carry out decision analysis in practice,” the society said in the award citation.

Bodily, who joined Darden in 1977 and retired in 2020, researched decision and risk analysis, multiattribute utility, strategy modeling and analysis, forecasting, lifetime consumption, and investment analysis. In addition to several books and a variety of journal articles, he authored or co-authored about 130 cases and technical notes on quantitative analytics.

In accepting the award at a ceremony in Seattle, Bodily shared both humorous and serious examples of how he and his colleagues explored, researched and taught decision analysis at Darden.

In 2001, for example, he and Darden Dean Emeritus Robert Bruner co-produced a case about the rise of Enron, based on 14 hours of video interviews with company leaders including Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay. After the case about the rise of Enron was taught many times, Enron began activities that led to its collapse in one of the most famous bankruptcies in U.S. corporate history.

Enron imploded in December 2001. With the Darden case set to be taught the following month, Bodily and Bruner worked over the holidays to write two new parts to the case: “The Fall of Enron” and “Lessons Learned.”

Immediately, the case and its new sections attracted attention. The New York Times published an article about the case on Jan. 31, 2002, titled “A Video Study Of Enron Offers A Picture of Life Before the Fall.”

A quote from Bodily in the Times article encapsulated some of Enron’s shady and ultimately catastrophic decision-making.

From the 2002 article: ”All of the partnerships are there to hide the debt and make it possible to keep going,” Dr. Bodily said in a phone interview this week. ”The strategy seemed to be, ‘I lost money in the poker game, so now I’ll take the mortgage down to the casino and gamble even harder,’ ” he said. ” ‘By tomorrow, I won’t have to tell them anything.’ ”

The article immediately generated inquiries from the likes of the Today show, Good Morning America, and others. Bodily and Bruner appeared later that week on the Today show with Katie Couric.

Among many other honors over his career, Bodily’s Decision Analysis paper “Reducing Risks and Improving Incentives in Funding Entrepreneurs” earned him the 2016 Decision Analysis Journal Special Recognition Award. He received that same award four years earlier for “Multiplicative Utilities for Health and Consumption, with Casey Lichtendahl. In addition, he received two runner-up awards for the Decision Analysis Publication Award.

Bodily also has been deeply involved over the years in leadership and service roles in the Decision Analysis Society and other organizations and initiatives dedicated to advancing the profession and practice. He also has consulted and taught executive programs at IBM, Oklahoma Gas and Electric, United Technologies, Tennessee Valley Authority, U.S. General Services Administration and others.

“I found a multitude of ways for decision analysis to make a difference in the world,” he said in his acceptance remarks. “I followed my dreams, although generally was far behind them and only hoped to catch up to them later. I did what I loved; I loved what I did.”

The award’s namesake, Frank Plumpton Ramsey, was the first to express an operational theory of decision-making based on the dual, intertwining notions of judgmental probability and utility, the society said. In his essay “Truth and Probability” in 1926, Ramsey adopted what is now termed the decision-theoretic point of view.