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 Project: 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.
