Larry Epstein
Professor
PhD, University of British Columbia
I received my PhD from UBC in 1977, and then held positions at U. Toronto, U. Rochester and Boston University. I returned to Canada and came to McGill in August 2021. I am particularly proud to have been elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society (1989) and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science (2013), and to have been awarded the Frisch Medal (1994).
Decision Theory studies how to model individual decision-making in a variety of contexts (for example, in the presence of uncertainty, or in a dynamic setting). The objective may be descriptive, including addressing "behavioral biases" highlighted by psychologists and experimentalists in economics, or prescriptive, such as when targeted towards statistical decision-making. My main research interest is in formal abstract modeling, often axiomatic in approach, though always with an eye towards tractability and usefulness for applications, both theoretical and empirical. Besides applications within economics, my work has connections to finance (theoretical and empirical asset pricing), operations research (robust stochastic optimization), probability theory (limit theorems), and statistics (robust inference and hypothesis testing).