ABSTRACT
I thrashed around looking for a thesis topic. First I wanted to do experimental research on risk, having in mind the pioneering work by psychologists Frederick Mosteller and Sidney Siegel in the 1940s that I had read about as an undergraduate in experimental psychology; that topic was deemed by the faculty not appropriate for a Ph.D. in business, however. (As of 1996, for two decades, this sort of work has been considered one of the most exciting and important of fields—and of course the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business has been one of its major centers.) Then I thought to start my own business, and in the course of doing so, develop a case study of the new enterprise; that was deemed insufficiently “scientific.”
