The Essential Tversky

by Amos Tversky, Michael Lewis (Foreword), Daniel Kahneman (Afterword)

Some of the best and most influential papers by Amos Tversky, one of the most brilliant social science thinkers of the twentieth century. Amos Tversky (1937–1996) was a towering figure in the cognitive and decision sciences. His work was ingenious, exciting, and influential, spanning topics from intuition to statistics to behavioral economics. His long and extraordinarily productive collaboration with his friend and colleague Daniel Kahneman was the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling book, The Undoing A Friendship that Changed Our Minds . The Essential Tversky offers a selection of Tversky's best, most influential and accessible papers, “classics” chosen to capture the essence of Tversky's thought. The impact of Tversky's work is far reaching and long-lasting. In 2002, Kahneman, who drew on their joint work in his much-praised 2013 book,  Thinking, Fast and Slow (and who contributes an afterword to this collection), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for work done with Tversky. In The Undoing Project , Lewis (who contributes a foreword to this collection) describes his discovery that Tversky and Kahneman's thinking laid the foundation for Moneyball , his own ode to number-crunching. The papers collected in The Essential Tversky cover topics that include cognitive and perceptual bias, misguided beliefs, inconsistent preferences, risky choice and loss aversion decisions, and psychological common sense. Together, they offer nonspecialist readers an introduction to one of the most brilliant social science thinkers of the twentieth century.

Genres: Psychology, Science, Nonfiction, Economics

396 pages, Paperback

Published July 17, 2018

About the author

Amos Nathan Tversky (Hebrew: עמוס טברסקי‎; March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was a cognitive and mathematical psychologist, a student of cognitive science, a collaborator of Daniel Kahneman, and a figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his early work concerned the foundations of measurement. He was co-author of a three-volume treatise, Foundations of Measurement (recently reprinted). His early work with Kahneman focused on the psychology of prediction and probability judgment. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman worked together to develop prospect theory, which aims to explain irrational human economic choices and is considered one of the seminal works of behavioral economics. Six years after Tversky's death, Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work he did in collaboration with Amos Tversky.[1] (The prize is not awarded posthumously.) Kahneman told The New York Times in an interview soon after receiving the honor: "I feel it is a joint prize. We were twinned for more than a decade."[2] Tversky also collaborated with Thomas Gilovich, Itamar Simonson, Paul Slovic and Richard Thaler in several papers.

Reviews

[Zacharias Koutsokostas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Book introduction: "When you encounter Amos, the more time it takes you to understand that he is smarter than you, the stupider you are."

The skeptic will not bother opening the book, while the stupid will start reading it while anchored to an unreasonable, delusional, and distasteful statement.

[Cory · Rating 5 out of 5]

All behavioral econ books should just be collections of articles