Amos Tversky

Co-developed prospect theory with Daniel Kahneman, showing that people don't weigh risk the way classical economics assumed and laying the empirical foundation for behavioral economics. Their earlier work identified the specific cognitive shortcuts — heuristics and biases — that distort human judgment under uncertainty. Tversky died in 1996, six years before Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their joint research; Kahneman has called it "a joint prize" between them.