Amos Tversky

Amos Tversky was a cognitive psychologist who collaborated with Daniel Kahneman to produce some of the most influential research in the history of decision science. Together they developed prospect theory and the heuristics and biases program — identifying systematic errors in human judgment including anchoring, framing effects, the representativeness heuristic, and the availability heuristic. This work fundamentally challenged the rational actor assumptions of classical economics and provided the foundation for behavioral economics and behavioral finance. Tversky passed away in 1996 before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Kahneman. His contributions to understanding how people evaluate probability and make choices under uncertainty remain as relevant to financial market microstructure and option pricing research as they are to the design of public health messaging and retirement savings policy.