Professor Emeritus
Academic Area:
Decision Sciences
Teaching / Research Interests
Mailing Information
Duke University: The Fuqua School of Business
100 Fuqua Drive
Durham, NC 27708
Bio
Robert Nau is a Professor Emeritus of Business Administration in the Fuqua School of Business, where he was a member of the Decision Sciences area. He received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. He was a full-time faculty member from 1985 to 2017, and he was previously on the faculty of the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. He has also been a visiting faculty member at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore.
Professor Nau is an internationally known authority on mathematical models of decision making under uncertainty. His research has been supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, and his papers have been published in journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, Annals of Statistics, Journal of Economic Theory, and the International Journal of Game Theory.
One of the themes in Professor Nau’s research is that models of rational decision making in various fields are linked by a single unifying principle, namely the principle of no-arbitrage, i.e., avoiding sure loss at the hands of a competitor. This principle is central to modern finance theory, and it can also be shown to be the fundamental rationality concept that underlies Bayesian statistics, decision analysis, and game theory. Professor Nau recently published a book that is based on his research in this area: Arbitrage and Rational Decisions (Chapman and Hall, 2025). In connection with this line of work, he formerly taught a course on Rational Choice Theory in the Ph.D. program that drew students from other departments and schools at Duke University
Professor Nau taught the core MBA courses on Decision Models and Statistics in several programs, and he developed an MBA elective course on time series forecasting which he taught throughout his career. He designed forecasting software that was incorporated in a commercial statistical analysis package (Statgraphics), and he also designed a regression analysis add-in for Excel (RegressIt) that was used in his courses at the Fuqua School. It was released on the internet as freeware in 2015 and has been downloaded over 20,000 times since then, and it has been adopted for teaching by a number of other universities. Prior to his academic career he was Manager of Information Systems for the National Risks division of Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, where he developed large-scale forecasting models for major corporate clients.