Judgment and Decision Making

PART I

Background

The field currently called behavioral decision research was first identified by Ward Edwards (1954), in “A theory of decision making.” Writing but a decade after von Neumann and Morgenstern’s classic (1944) exposition of utility theory (see also Savage, 1954), Ward showed the essential role of behavioral research in translating utility theory from a brilliant abstraction to a practical way to understand and improve actual behavior. The drift in the field’s name, through the intermediate behavioral decision making, reflects the growing realization that no single theory could cover the diversity of decision making. The field has, however, retained its unifying commitment to examining choices from both analytical and empirical ...