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A Science of Decision Making: The
Legacy of Ward Edwards |
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Edited by Jie W. Weiss and David J. Weiss
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 |
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Ward Edwards is well known as the
father of the field of behavioral decision making. Edwards’s pioneering 1954
Psychological Bulletin paper on decision making brought psychological ideas
into what had been the province of economists. One can trace a direct path
from Ward’s work to the development of prospect theory, which brought Daniel
Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Prize. Indeed, this linkage was noted in the
Nobel Committee’s announcement. Edwards brought Bayesian statistics to
the attention of psychologists in a 1963 Psychological Review paper; the
continued proliferation of Bayesian ideas is a testament to the importance
of that perspective. In a 1962 IEEE paper, he foresaw how systems in which
humans provided (subjective) probabilities and machines provided
computational power could transform the world of intelligence gathering and
analysis. And in a 1986 book written with Detlof von Winterfeldt, Edwards
showed how multiattribute utility analysis could help real-world decision
makers to generate satisfactory solutions to complex problems. In this
volume, we reprint 29 of his most important papers, a sufficient selection
for the reader to see how the field was shaped by its father. We have
divided the papers into four problem areas: (1) Behavioral Decision Theory;
(2) Statistics and Methodology; (3) Diagnosis; (4) Multiattribute Utility.
Ward dipped into these areas recurrently over the forty years of his career
as a professor and researcher.
It is perhaps less
well known that Edwards made substantial contributions during the years
after his retirement. Illness reduced his public appearances, but Ward
continued his incisive thinking behind the scenes. Those who collaborated
with him in those last years found that he continued to be a source of
exciting new ideas. By that time, he positioned himself as a guru, ready to
appreciate a problem and bring his still-keen intellect to bear on the
central issues. Ward was the great partitioner, structuring a domain into
pieces that he thought were understood and those that the field had not yet
dealt with effectively.
Along with the
earlier works, we include 7 papers on which Edwards collaborated during the
last few years of his life. Ward was not the first author on any of the
papers, but his ideas were central in all of them. The papers present
theoretical arguments rather than empirical demonstrations, proposals rather
than completed projects.
Each paper is
preceded by a short introduction written by the editors. The introductions
incorporate our renditions of Ward’s reflections on the content or impact of
the older papers, and of conversations we had with him as the recent ones
were being written.
The book includes a
complete bibliography of Edwards’s publications, consisting of almost 200
references. Also, we include three obituaries, written with humor and
affection for the newsletters of professional associations of which he was a
member.
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