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Professor of Economics Uzi Segal has been elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the world’s leading learned society for economists.
Most of Segal’s work involves the fields of decision theory and social choice. One of his projects dealt with analysis of the basic rule that the probability of two independent events both happening is the product of their probabilities — a rule that Segal said can apply to, for example, gambling tendencies and the Internal Revenue Service’s policy on auditing tax returns.
The Econometric Society nomination committee listed Segal’s paper, “Let’s agree that all dictatorships are equally bad,” as one of his main contributions to the field of social choice. Segal’s research shows how minimal consensus among members of society that a dictatorship is bad — regardless of the dictator’s identity — can lead to agreement on allocating social resources and overcoming the inability to compare different individuals’ well-being.
Other members of the Economics Department who have been elected to the Econometric Society are Roche Professor of Economics Arthur Lewbel and Professor Tayfun Sonmez.