Uzi Segal

Biography

Uzi Segal was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a faculty member at the University of Toronto, University of Western Ontario, and Boston College where he currently is a Professor of Economics. He joined the Behavioural Science group in the Warwick Business School in 2013.

Segal serves as an associate editor for Theoretical Economics and the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. between 1995 and 2010 he was an associate editor for Econometrica and between 2012 and 2014 an associate editor with the Journal of Economic Theory.

He is a fellow of the Econometric Society (2012) and an Economic Theory fellow (2011).

Research Interests

Segal''s main topic of research is decision making under risk and uncertainty. In 1987 he offered an explanation of the famous Ellsberg paradox which is based on the idea that decision makers view uncertainty as a set of beliefs over different possible worlds. He applied this approach in numerous articles to issues in Law and Economics, offering for example an explanation to the well known fact that criminal sanctions are publicized but probability of detection is kept secret. Segal published several articles on the transitivity axiom (the requirement that if option x is preferred to y and y is preferred to z, then x is preferred to z). In a recent paper with Ariel Rubinstein they showed that behaving in accordance with this axiom does not imply the existence of well behaved preferences as this behavior can be the outcome of alternative simple procedures. He is currently working on the analysis of situation where ambiguity regarding the true probabilities of events is desired.

Decision theory
Risk and Uncertainty
Distributive justice