Encyclopedia > Bruno de Finetti

  Article Content

Bruno de Finetti

Bruno de Finetti (1906 - 1985) was an Italian probabilist and statistician, noted for the "operational subjective" conception of probability.

De Finetti proposed a thought experiment along something like the following lines: You must set the price of a promise to pay $1 if there was life on Mars 1 billion years ago, and $0 if there was not, and tomorrow the answer will be revealed. You know that your opponent will be able to choose either to buy such a promise from you after you at the price you have set, or require you to buy such a promise from your opponent, still at the same price. In other words: you set the odds, but your opponent decides which side of the bet will be yours. The price you set is the "operational subjective probability" that you assign to the proposition on which you are betting.

De Finetti is also noted for de Finetti's theorem on exchangeable sequences of random variables. It was de Finetti who introduced this concept of exchangeability.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
French resistance

... also assisted later Allied invasions in south of France called Operation Dragoon and Anvil[?]. When Allied forces begun to approach Paris in August 19, ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 27.6 ms