Ward Edwards


Ward Edwards was an American psychologist, prominent for work on decision theory and on the formulation and revision of beliefs.

Education

Edwards attended Swarthmore College and then received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University.

Awards

"The Association for Psychological Science named Ward Edwards as a James McKeen Cattell Fellow in recognition of his sustained and seminal contributions to the technology of decision making and to behavioral decision theory", .

Research

Edwards published more than one hundred journal articles and books including Decision Analysis and Behavioral Research and Utility Theories: Measurement and Applications. In the introduction to a Festschrift for Edwards, Barbara Mellers states
In 1962, Edwards founded the Bayesian Research Conference with the aim to incorporate and apply Bayesian statistical methods and ideas to decision theory. In Statistics he is well known as lead author of Edwards, Lindman, and Savage, Bayesian Statistical Inference for Psychological Research, Psychological Review, 70, 193–242. This article introduced the notion of 'stable estimation', and was the first to note that a p-value of 0.05 in the Normal model corresponded to a lower bound on the Bayes Factor of 0.26.