Amos Tversky
[entity_type::person] [role::cognitive-psychologist]
Israeli-American cognitive psychologist. With Daniel Kahneman, co-founded the heuristics and biases research program and developed Prospect Theory. Died 1996; the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Kahneman alone in 2002 (Nobels are not awarded posthumously).
Tversky is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in behavioral economics and judgment research. Kahneman has said that Tversky was the more brilliant of the two.
Key Contributions (with Kahneman)
- Availability heuristic (1973) — probability judged by ease of recall
- Anchoring and adjustment (1974) — initial values exert disproportionate influence
- Representativeness heuristic (1974) — probability judged by similarity to prototype
- Prospect Theory (1979) — reference-dependent valuation, loss aversion
- Framing effects (1981) — logically equivalent choices produce different decisions based on presentation
Key Works
- Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1974). “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.
- Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981). “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science, 211(4481), 453–458.
- Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1983). “Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment.” Psychological Review, 90(4), 293–315.