A BIT OF HISTORY OF THESE MEETINGS

The Bayesian Research Conference was hosted for 41 years by Ward Edwards, and for many years it was held each year in mid-February at the Sportsman's Lodge in Studio City, California. These meetings have been very high in quality, extremely diverse in topic and approach, and under Ward's leadership since 1961, they established a pattern of extremely fruitful, constructive, and congenial meetings. Starting with the 42nd meeting, the event has been held on the campus of California State University, Fullerton.

The 44th and succeeding conferences are now the        Edwards Bayesian Research Conference,        honoring Ward Edwards, a founder of the field of behavioral decision research, who passed away in early 2005. In this picture, Ward and Jim Shanteau converse at an earlier meeting. As Ben Newall (2009) has written, "Ward Edwards is commonly regarded as the Father of behavioral decision making. In two papers,        The Theory of Decision Making        published in        Psychological Bulletin        in 1954 and        Behavioral Decision Theory        published in the        Annual Review of Psychology        in 1961 he founded and then subsequently gave a name to the field. Then in 1963 he introduced psychologists to Bayesian thinking with his paper        Bayesian Statistical Inference for Psychological Research        published in    Psychological Review.        These truly seminal papers have become part of the folklore of the field and their influence can hardly be overstated." To those accomplishments, one might add his paper in the        Psychological Review        on        Subjective probabilities inferred from decisions        in which Edwards introduced the idea of probability weighting functions that depend on the configuration of consequences, an idea that is central to Prospect Theory, which was co-authored by his former student, Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman.