Home | News | Fellow Peter Wakker Awarded Frank P. Ramsey Medal
News | November 04, 2013

Fellow Peter Wakker Awarded Frank P. Ramsey Medal

Fellow Peter Wakker has been awarded with the Frank P. Ramsey Medal of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society to recognize distinguished contributions to theory and applications of the field. This medal is the highest award of the INFORMS DAS. The Ramsey Medalists are recognized for having made substantial further contributions to that theory and its application to important classes of real decision problems. The Medal is accompanied by a $1,000 honorarium.

INFORMS

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (O.R.), management science, and analytics. DAS examines how we can discover irrational inconsistencies in our decisions and use them to improve those decisions. It researches the prescriptive and quantitative part of behavioral economics (nudge). The Decision Analysis Society (DAS) Frank P. Ramsey Medeal was created to recognize distinguished contributions to the field of decision analysis. The medal is named in honor of Frank Plumpton Ramsey, a Cambridge University mathematician who was one of the pioneers of decision theory in the 20th century. His 1926 essay “Truth and Probability” (published posthumously in 1931) anticipated many of the developments in mathematical decision theory later made by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Leonard J. Savage, and others.

About Frank Plumpton Ramsey

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was the first to express an operational theory of decision-making based on the dual, intertwining notions of judgmental probability and utility. In his essay “truth and Probability” in 1926, Ramsey adopted what is now termed the decision-theoretic point of view. To Ramsey, probability was an expression of a degree of belief interpreted as operationally meaningful in terms of a willingness to act based on that belief… Source: INFORMS website

About Peter Wakker

Peter Wakker is a TI research fellow and a  professor of decisions under uncertainty at the Department of Econometrics of the Erasmus School of Economics. He works in behavioral economics, primarily on the differences between normative and descriptive decisions, and on decisions under risk and uncertainty.