Teddy Seidenfeld, H.A. Simon Professor of Philosophy and Statistics, Departments of Philosophy and Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
Ph.D. Columbia University, 1976
Teddy Seidenfeld works at the interface between philosophy and statistics, often being concerned with problems that involve multiple decision makers. For example, in collaboration with M.J. Schervish and J.B. Kadane (Statistics, CMU), they have relaxed the norms of Bayesian theory to permit a unified standard, both for individuals acting as separate decision makers and collectively, in forming a cooperative group agent. By contrast, this is an impossibility for strict Bayesian theory. For a second example, in collaboration with Larry Wasserman (Statistics, CMU), they have examined the short-run consequences of using Bayes rule for updating a set of expert Bayesian opinions with shared information. They focus on anomalous cases (they call dilation), where an experiment is certain to result in new evidence that increases the experts: uncertainty about an event of common interest where uncertainty is reflected in the extent of probabilistic disagreements among the experts. His current collaboration with Kadane and Schervish incudes a theory for indexing the degree of incoherence in non-Bayesian statistical decisions.