RG

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Decision making

KEY THINKER

Daniel Ellsberg (1931–)

BEFORE

1921 US economist Frank Knight explains that “risk” can be quantified and “uncertainty” cannot.

1954 In The Foundations of Statistics, US mathematician L. J. Savage tries to show how probabilities can be assigned to unknown future events.

AFTER

From 1970s Behavioral economics uses experiments to study behavior under conditions of uncertainty.

1989 Michael Smithson proposes a “taxonomy” of risk.

2007 Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan discusses the problem of rare, unforeseen events.

By the 1960s mainstream economics had settled on a set of principles for understanding people’s ...

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