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'Daniel Kahneman' (born March 5, 1934 in Tel Aviv), is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate, notable for his pioneering work on behavioral finance and hedonic psychology.
With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973, Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (generally referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics) for his work in prospect theory, despite being a research psychologist and not an economist.

Contents

Biography

Notable contributions

See also

References

External links

Biography

Kahneman spent his childhood years in Paris, France and moved to Israel in 1946. He received his B.Sc. with a major in psychology and a minor in mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1954, after which he served in the Israeli Defense Forces, principally in its psychology department. In 1958 he went to the United States and earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961.
Currently a faculty member at Princeton University and a fellow at Hebrew University, he is the winner of the 2002 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (generally referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics) for his work in prospect theory despite being a research psychologist and not an economist. In fact, Kahneman claims to have never taken a single economics course — he claims that what he knows of the subject he and Tversky learned from collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch.
In explaining why he entered the field of psychology, Kahneman once wrote:
:It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting (Kahneman, 2003, p. 417).
In 2007, Kahneman was presented with the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology[1].

Notable contributions

★ anchoring and adjustment

★ availability heuristic

★ base rate fallacy

★ conjunction fallacy

★ framing (economics)

★ loss aversion

★ peak-end rule

★ preference reversal

★ prospect theory

★ cumulative prospect theory

★ representativeness heuristic

★ simulation heuristic

★ status quo bias

See also

★ Optimism bias

★ Planning fallacy

References

★ Kahneman, D. (2003). Maps of bounded rationality: A perspective on intuitive judgment and choice. In T. Frangsmyr (Ed.), ''Les Prix Nobel 2002'' [Nobel Prizes 2002]. Stockholm, Sweden: Almquist & Wiksell International.

★ Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). ''Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases''. New York: Cambridge University Press.

★ Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. ''Psychological Review'', ''80'', 237-251.

★ Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decisions under risk. ''Econometrica'', ''47'', 313-327.

External links

★ Daniel Kahneman CV, April 2007

★ Princeton bio

★ Nobel Prize lecture: Maps of Bounded Rationality (real video)

★ Why Hawks Win. ''Foreign Policy'', January/February 2007 (with Jonathan Renshon).