The science of decision-making.

Every decision worth making is made under risk — a weighing of reward against what could go wrong. Advancing how those decisions get made is not work any firm does alone, and it does not happen by stockpiling white papers. Since its launch in 1985, Northfield has put its focus, capital, and strategy into the dialog between researchers, practitioners, and markets.

One thousand economists, wearing one thousand pairs of noise-cancelling headphones at one thousand MacBooks, do not ultimately produce The Wealth of Nations.

So we work in company — sharing our minds, our research, our data, and even our products, from Open Optimizer to OpenFinance. Not as charity, but because intellectual and commercial progress compound fastest in exchange: between the academy, the market, and the practitioners closest to the problem.

Northfield Labs, at the edge of Harvard Yard, exists for a single purpose: to advance the world's understanding of decision-making, and to turn that understanding on the problems sophisticated investors actually face — always through the fundamental prism of risk.

That work runs through the core elements we build with — strategy, culture, team, data, and technology — and reaches into the primitives beneath decision-making itself: psychology and organizational behavior, systems analysis, mathematics, topological data analysis, string theory, philosophy. Wherever a better account of how decisions get made might come from, we go looking for it — in company with academics, institutions, governments, and the firms building alongside us.

Our R&D agenda runs from factor methodology and portfolio optimization to semantic data models and preference modeling — the science, information, and alignment that make up the ALPHA platform. The through-line is the same one Northfield started with: turning serious research into tools institutions can actually use.

The Journal of Asset Management is edited from Northfield Labs. We sponsor the IAQF/Northfield Financial Engineer of the Year Award. We host regular salons and visiting scholars, and we share data, systems, and ideas — because the fastest way to advance the field is to work on it in company.

This is a people strategy before it is anything else. We are hiring and expanding aggressively — a team that already includes a best-selling author on data analysis and the founding director of Columbia's MS in Applied Analytics program; researchers who have taught at the University of Chicago, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, among others; economists who have served at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and held the chief economist's chair at Morningstar; and specialists in mathematics, organizational behavior, and the decision sciences. We are still growing — deliberately — to deepen our research and commercial relationships with academics, institutions, governments, and the firms we work beside.

Work on our team, or with it →