Analogies and Theories

The book describes formal models of reasoning that are aimed at capturing the way that economic agents, and decision makers in general think about their environment and make predictions based on their past experience. The focus is on analogies (case-based reasoning) and general theories (rule-based reasoning), and on the interaction between them, as well as between them and Bayesian reasoning. A unified approach allows one to study the dynamics of inductive reasoning in terms of the mode of reasoning that is used to generate predictions.

Itzhak Gilboa obtained a BSc in mathematics and computer science and a BA in economics. He studied mathematical economics with David Schmeidler and obtained his MA (1984) and his PhD (1987) in the field of decision theory. Gilboa's research focuses on decision under uncertainty, and has worked extensively with David Schmeidler on axiomatic foundation of non-Bayesian decision theory. He has also contributed to complexity in game theory, evolutionary game theory, and social choice. He has published three books, an Econometric Society Monograph Series text entitled Theory of Decision under Uncertainty, and two textbooks entitled Rational Choice, and Making Better Decisions. Professor Gilboa holds the AXA Chair of Decision Sciences at HEC, Paris, the Chair of Economic Theory and Decision Theory at Tel-Aviv University. Larry Samuelson received BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois. After appointments at Penn State and the University of Wisconsin, he has, since 2007, been a professor of economics at Yale University, and is the A. Douglas Melamed Professor of Economics at Yale. He has served as a co-editor of Econometrica and the American Economic Review. Professor Samuelson's research has focussed on game theory, with emphasis on the evolutionary foundations of behaviour in games and on behaviour in repeated games. David Schmeidler is Professor Emeritus at Tel-Aviv University and at The Ohio State University. He received his PhD in Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Robert Aumann. HE has worked on cooperative games, general equilibrium analysis, social justice, implementation, and other fields. Over the past few decades he has focused on decision under uncertainty, mostly in the absence of well-defined probabilities.