Amos Tversky (1937–1996)

Who They Were

Amos Tversky (1937-1996) was an Israeli cognitive psychologist and, for decades, Daniel Kahneman's closest collaborator. Their partnership, which grew from work begun in the 1970s, challenged the rational-agent assumption common to nearly all the earlier schools of economics and helped found the field now called behavioural economics. Tversky combined mathematical precision with experimental psychology, using carefully designed studies to reveal the systematic ways human judgment departs from the predictions of standard decision theory. His work spanned probability judgment, choice, and the psychology of risk. Tversky died in 1996. Because the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences is not awarded posthumously, he did not share the 2002 prize that recognised the research he and Kahneman had produced together; Kahneman received that award, together with the experimental economist Vernon Smith.

Key Contributions

With Kahneman, Tversky developed the ideas that define early behavioural economics. Their 1979 paper in Econometrica set out prospect theory, documenting systematic departures from the expected-utility model that economists had long assumed. Earlier, their 1974 paper in Science identified the availability heuristic, by which people estimate likelihood from the ease of recalling examples, along with other heuristics and biases in judgment under uncertainty. In further work published in Science in 1981 they showed that framing matters: the same gamble is accepted or rejected depending only on how it is described, demonstrating that stated preferences are not stable in the way standard theory requires. These findings, produced jointly over many years, supplied much of the experimental foundation on which later behavioural economists built.

On EconRecall

Cognitive psychologist and Kahneman's closest collaborator; a founder of behavioural economics who died in 1996, before the 2002 Nobel. Play the games that feature Amos Tversky: