Zvi Safra

Zvi Safra (born March 8, 1952 in Jerusalem) is an Israel and British economist and Decision theory.
Safra is a professor at the Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, Emeritus Professor at the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University. Safra is an editor at the Economics & Philosophy and an elected fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. Safra was formerly a Vice Chancellor at the College of Management Academic Studies.
==Work and academic career==
Safra obtained his degrees in mathematics and economics from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, including a Ph.D. under Menachem E. Yaari and Yves Balasko in 1982. In that year Safra was accepted as a Rothschild Foundation fellow, and was invited to stay as a post-doc at Harvard University. Upon his return to Israel, he was awarded the Alon Scholarship for outstanding young Israeli scientists and joined as a faculty member at Tel Aviv University, where he remained until 2005. Over these years he served as the head of the Ph.D. program at the Coller School of Management and the head of the Department of Decisions and Operations Research.
During 2006-2010, while serving as the Vice Chancellor of the Israeli College of Management Academic Studies, he was instrumental at raising the College’s academic standards and developing new academic programs, including a selective interdisciplinary program for the College’s most talented students.
Safra moved to the University of Warwick in 2013 after serving two years as the head of the Ph.D program at the University of Exeter Business School. At the Warwick Business School and with the help of colleagues, he initiated and organized the Behavioral Science Summer Schools for young researchers from around the world taught by distinguished international group of researchers.
==Research==
His most influential works are in the fields of individual choice under risk and under uncertainty, bargaining, and Social choice theory. His most important contributions to decision theory are: the rigorous analysis of the preference reversal phenomenon and the demonstration that for individuals who violate the Independence of irrelevant alternativesthe Becker–DeGroot–Marschak method Becker, DeGroot and Marshack mechanism of utility elicitation may fail, the pioneering analysis of risk aversion in the Rank-dependent expected utility, the first analysis of Auction theory without Expected expected utility, and the discovery that not only expected utility, but all known models of decision under risk are vulnerable to Matthew Rabin's calibration criticism.
His main contribution to bargaining theory is the extension of the axiomatic Nash Bargaining Solution to ordinal and non-expected utility preferences. His main contributions to social choice theory include an axiomatization of individual behavior that is motivated by an intrinsic sense of fairness, and an extension of John Harsanyi impartial observer model that can accommodate concerns for fairness and different individuals’ risk attitudes, and that yields the Prioritarian social welfare function as a special case.
Category:1952 births
Category:People from Jerusalem
Category:Hebrew University of Jerusalem alumni
Category:Economists