Aron Katsenelinboigen

Aron Iosifovich Katsenelinboigen (Арон Иосифович Каценелинбойген; September 2, 1927 – July 30, 2005) was a founder of predispositioning theory, a subject in decision theory and systems theory that models development in the context of uncertainty.

Katsenelinboigen was born in Izyaslavl in the Ukrainian SSR.

At fourteen, he enrolled at the Uzbekistan Institute of Economics, transferring four years later, in 1945, to the Moscow State Institute of Economics.

There he graduated the following year and spent a further three years pursuing post-graduate work.

He received a PhD in Economics in 1957 and became a Doctor of Economic Science in 1966.

In 1973, Katsenelinboigen emigrated to the United States, where he continued to research indeterministic economics and develop predispositioning theory.

In 1974, after a brief sojourn at the University of California, Berkeley, Katsenelinboigen joined the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

During this time, he was also a visiting professor at Princeton University, where he presented a course on the Soviet economy.

In 1977, he joined the Wharton School's Department of Social Systems Sciences and became a full professor before moving to the Department of Decision Sciences in 1987.

He became a United States citizen in 1979.

He also began to explore the application of predispositioning theory in fields other than economics, such as biology, psychology and theology.

From 1990, when Vera Zubarev became one of his pupils, he and she began researching its application in literature and art.

He retired in 2004.

Katsenelinboigen's use of positional and combinational styles of chess as metaphors for the mental processes underlying decision-making continue to be taught by Zubarev at the University of Pennsylvania.