Barry Nalebuff is a professor at Yale School of Management (SOM), an angel investor, and an expert in negotiation, innovation, strategy, and game theory.
After graduating from MIT with degrees in economics and mathematics, Barry Nalebuff earned his MPhil and PhD from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
Barry Nalebuff is currently the Milton Steinbach Professor at Yale School of Management, a position he has held for 30+ years. He has previously worked as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University’s Society of Fellows (1982-1985) and held the position of Bicentennial Preceptorship at Princeton University (1989-1991).
Nalebuff works with many entrepreneurial firms. He co-founded Honest Tea in 1998 with his former student Seth Goldman, which was later acquired by Coca-Cola in 2011. He also co-founded Kombrewcha, a slightly alcoholic kombucha company acquired by AB-InBev in 2016. He is currently working on building the startup Real Made Foods in addition to working with Quaker Oats to help create Maker Oats, an overnight oats product.
Barry Nalebuff is a board member at Q Drinks, Calicraft Beer, AGP Glass, and Nationwide Insurance. Barry Nalebuff is also a member of Trader.Com N.V.’s supervisory board and serves on the board of Directors of Bear Stearns Financial Products and Connecticut Citizenship Fund.Further, Dr. Nalebuff has consulted for over 50 multinational companies, including advising the NBA in their negotiations with the players’ association.
Dr. Nalebuff specializes in business strategy, negotiation, game theory, and start-ups (consumer products). His current academic research focuses on bundling and tying.
Barry Nalebuff is the co-author of seven books:
His books explore game theory, negotiation tactics, problem-solving, and investment strategies, with over 400,000 copies in print. In addition to authoring novels, Barry Nalebuff has published articles in reputable journals like Harvard Business Review and Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.
Dr. Nalebuff teaches highly-rated negotiation, innovation, strategy, and game theory courses at Yale SOM. His negotiation course on Coursera has over 400,000 active learners and is the second-highest rated on the platform. Dr. Nalebuff’s negotiation course teaches students how to see beneath the surface of apparent conflicts to uncover the underlying interests and how to predict, interpret, and shape the behavior of those you face in competitive situations.
He pioneered the concept of “co-opetition” (cooperating while competing) and developed a “split the pie” negotiation approach focused on creating and equitably dividing additional value through cooperation. His teaching style, which has been highly rated by students, emphasizes experiential learning, case studies, and simulations.
Dr. Nalebuff has also done media interviews to share his negotiation framework highlighted in Split the Pie. His philosophy on negotiation emphasizes finding the “negotiation pie” – the additional value created by working together. He advocates for splitting that value equitably rather than haggling over positions and believes in principled, non-aggressive negotiation tactics.
With Ian Ayres, Barry Nalebuff has also regularly appeared in Forbes as a columnist.
Some of Dr. Balebuff’s notable journal articles include:
