Aron Katsenelinboigen - Background

Background

Katsenelinboigen enrolled at the Uzbekistan Institute of Economics at the age of fourteen. In 1945 he transferred to the Moscow State Institute of Economics, from which he graduated in 1946 at the age 19. He spent three years on post-graduate work in the same institute. In 1957 he received a PhD in Economics and in 1966 he received a degree of Doctor of Economic Sciences.

Aron Katsenelinboigen emigrated to the United States in October 1973, where he received citizenship (1979) and continued to conduct research in the field of indeterministic economics, gradually elaborating his concept of predispositioning that he later applied to other fields of knowledge, including business, biology, psychology, and theology. Together with his pupil, Vera Zubarev, whom he met in 1990, he further developed this theory, applying it to literature and art. The theory of predispositioning explores development under the conditions of uncertainty. Initially, chess was used as a model in which the positional and material parameters comprising the system where explicitly stated and evaluated.

After a brief stay at the University of California in Berkley, in 1974 Aron Katsenelinboigen began working at the University of Pennsylvania at the Department of Economics. In the mid-1970s he was also a visiting professor at Princeton University where he taught a course on Soviet Economy. In 1977 he joined the Social Systems Sciences department at the Wharton School, where he became a full Professor. In 1987 he joined the faculty of the Department of Decision Sciences until his retirement in 2004.

His teachings of positional and combinational styles and predispositioning are now promulgated by Zubarev, who teaches two popular courses at the University of Pennsylvania, namely Fate and Chance and Winners and Losers. These classes apply Katsenelinboigen's key teachings by frequently employing chess as a metaphor for the various mental processes underlying decision-making.