Dear all,

If you are looking more generally at the history, it's unsurprising the word 'gamble' wasn't used much before the mid-20th century. While it was a common word in english since the 18th century (but was a colloquialism), it seems to have moved up in popularity post 1900 (see for example google ngrams).

De Moivre, in arguably the first textbook on probability in English, uses 'wager' throughout (which is natural, as his attention is on games of chance).

Best,
Sam Cohen

so On 06/06/17 14:01, Teddy Seidenfeld wrote:

Dear Mik, Erik, and Friends,

I'm no scholar of the term 'gamble', but it's been used by many decision theorists��in closely related senses.

For instance, Savage's (1954) section��5.2 (titled 'Gambles') uses it within his theory (of��subjective expected utility)��to refer to the equivalence class of simple acts that carry the same (personal) probability distribution over consequences.�� Savage is generalizing the von Neumann-Morgenstern sense of 'gamble'.

I grew up with the von Neumann-Morgenstern's theory of cardinal utility for gambles -- though vN-M use an extraneous concept of 'probability' in contrast with Savage's approach.

Best,

Teddy

On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 7:12 PM, Professor Bickis <bickis@snoopy.usask.ca> wrote:

Hello:

Can someone answer this question?

Was it Walley who initiated the word ��gamble�� to use in place of the classical ��random variable��?�� De Finetti uses ��random quantity��, as does Williams.�� Gamble�� is ubiquitous in the current literature, but I have not seen it anywhere prior to Walley��s 1991 book.
Walley does not seem to attribute the term to anyone else.

Mik Bickis
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