Amos Tversky - Böcker

Critical Thinking examines how we make judgments under uncertainty and how various biases can distort our consideration of evidence. Via everyday examples, Varda Liberman and Amos Tversky explore the insights of probability, causal relationships, and making inferences from samples with the goal of helping readers improve their intuitive reasoning.

Drawing on such diverse but related disciplines as economics, cognitive psychology, statistics, and game and decision-making theory, the book considers the barriers to successful negotiation in such areas as civil litigation, family law, arms control, labor management disputes, environmental treaty making, and politics. When does it pay for parties to a dispute to cooperate, and when to compete? How can third-party negotiators further resolutions and avoid the pitfalls that deepen the division between antagonists? Offering answers to these and related questions, this book is a comprehensive guide to the latest understanding of ways to resolve human conflict.

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important social, medical, and political situations as well. Individual chapters discuss the representativeness and availability heuristics, problems in judging covariation and control, overconfidence, multistage inference, social perception, medical diagnosis, risk perception, and methods for correcting and improving judgments under uncertainty. About half of the chapters are edited versions of classic articles; the remaining chapters are newly written for this book. Most review multiple studies or entire subareas of research and application rather than describing single experimental studies. This book will be useful to a wide range of students and researchers, as well as to decision makers seeking to gain insight into their judgments and to improve them.

The analysis of decision making under uncertainty has again become a major focus of interest. This volume presents contributions from leading specialists in different fields and provides a summary and synthesis of work in this area. It is based on a conference held at the Harvard Business School. The book brings together the different approaches to decision making - normative, descriptive, and prescriptive - which largely correspond to different disciplinary interests. Mathematicians have concentrated on rational procedures for decision making - how people should make decisions. Psychologists have examined how poeple do make decisions, and how far their behaviour is compatible with any rational model. Operations researchers study the application of decision models to actual problems. Throughout, the aim is to present the current state of research and its application and also to show how the different disciplinary approaches can inform one another and thus lay the foundations for the integrated analysis of decision making. The book will be of interest to researchers, teachers - for use as background reading for a decision theory course - students, and consultants and others involved in the practical application of the analysis of decision making. It will be of interest to specialists and students in statistics, mathematics, economics, psychology and the behavioural sciences, operations research, and management science.