Rutgers professor awarded honorary doctorate by the University of Economics in Prague

Nov. 16, 2009 - PRLog -- Rutgers Business School Professor of Accounting, Business Ethics & Information Systems Glenn Shafer was recently awarded an honorary doctoral degree in economics from the University of Economics in Prague, in recognition of his contributions to finance, management, and auditing. Dr. Shafer was awarded the degree in the presence of Jan Fischer, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. The ceremony, held on October 8th, was organized solely for the purpose of presenting the honorary degree to Dr. Shafer and his Harvard colleague A.P. Dempster.

The University of Economics’ Scientific Board praised Dr. Shafer’s joint work with Dempster on the mathematical theory of evidence recently renamed as the Dempster-Shafer theory along with more recent work with Vladimir Vovk on game-theoretic probability. The university is a leader in the field of management and economics in the Czech Republic and has previously awarded its honorary doctoral degree in economics to top names like Milton Friedman and Gary S. Becker.

“It is a great honor to receive this degree from the University of Economics in Prague especially since I have been awarded it along with Dr. Dempster who is also my mentor and supporter,” said Shafer on receipt of the honorary doctorate degree. “My first book, A Mathematical Theory of Evidence, published in 1976, was written with the goal of understanding the meaning of probability and the distinction between objective and subjective probability. It led to my second book ‘The Art of Casual Conjuncture,’ published in 1996, where I argued that objective probability and causality should be understood not in terms of a direct link between probability and frequency but also in terms of prediction.”

Shafer said the insights from his earlier books gained a much more powerful form in “Probability and Finance: It’s Only a Game,” which he co-authored with Vladimir Vovk in 2001. Through this book, Shafer and Vovk revived Blaise Pascal’s and Jean Ville’s game-theoretic foundation for probability and obtained generalizations of classical limit theorems that apply directly to financial markets.

“My work has gone full circle,” said Shafer. “As I argued against early critics of Dempster-Shafer theory, judgments of relevance or irrelevance, dependence or independence, in any theory of probability judgment, are constitutive of the judgments, not prior to them.”

Dr. Glenn Shafer has been teaching at the Rutgers Business School - Newark and New Brunswick since 1992 and directs the school’s doctoral program. He has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. His primary expertise lies in Audit Judgment, Causal Modeling and Uncertain Reasoning, Expert Systems, Information Systems, and Statistical Reasoning.

Dr. Shafer’s recognition as a leader in his field is another example of Rutgers Business School’s world-class faculty that deliver the business, science and technology credentials to drive local, national and global markets.

Please visit http://business.rutgers.edu for more information.

Written By Richie Mehta

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