Howard Raiffa, an economics professor whose mathematical formulas for decision making were applied to the search for a missing nuclear bomb and the siting of a Mexico City airport, and were even suggested as a way to resolve a strike by professional hockey players, died on July 8 at his home in Oro Valley, Ariz. He was 92.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, his daughter, Judith Raiffa, said.

Professor Raiffa (pronounced RAY-fa), a co-founder of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (now the Harvard Kennedy School) and a member of the university faculty for 37 years, pioneered what became known as decision science — an academic discipline that encompasses negotiating techniques, conflict resolution, risk analysis and game theory.

He was an innovative and often abstruse theoretician, but he applied his postulates to real-world cases of conflict, cooperation and compromise in planning curriculums, publishing guidebooks and making videos. He was also the founding director, in 1972, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a joint American-Soviet research organization that explored energy, pollution and other issues as a cooperative venture during the Cold War.

“I learned a lot about the theory and practice of many-party negotiations in the presence of extreme cultural differences,” he once said.