William Poundstone Books
William Poundstone is an American author and science writer known for his works on psychology, economics, and game theory. His books, including 'Fortune's Formula' and 'Gaming the Vote', combine rigorous research with accessible storytelling to explain complex ideas in human decision-making and rationality.
Known for: Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
Books by William Poundstone
Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
Fortune’s Formula is a gripping exploration of one of the most powerful ideas ever developed about risk: the Kelly criterion, a mathematical rule for deciding how much to bet when the odds are in your...
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
In this book, William Poundstone explores the psychology behind pricing and value perception. Drawing on behavioral economics and cognitive science, he reveals how consumers are influenced by marketin...
Key Insights from William Poundstone
Claude Shannon and Information as Power
Great fortunes often begin with a strange insight: uncertainty can be measured. Fortune’s Formula starts with Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs genius who transformed communication by showing that information is something quantifiable, not just abstract meaning. Shannon’s information theory explained ho...
From Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
John Kelly and Optimal Bet Sizing
Being right is not enough; the size of your bet determines whether being right will actually make you rich. That is the heart of John Kelly’s 1956 breakthrough. Working from ideas rooted in information theory, Kelly developed a formula for determining the optimal fraction of capital to wager when th...
From Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
Edward Thorp: From Blackjack to Markets
A theory becomes truly dangerous when someone proves it works. Edward Thorp was the person who carried mathematical betting out of the lab and into the real world. Poundstone presents Thorp as one of the book’s most compelling figures: a disciplined, inventive thinker who used probability, computing...
From Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
How Betting Theory Reached Wall Street
Financial markets may look more respectable than racetracks, but Poundstone argues that both are arenas where prices reflect crowd beliefs under uncertainty. That is why ideas from gambling migrated so naturally into finance. Once thinkers like Thorp and others recognized that mispriced odds in spor...
From Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
Entropy, Probability, and Decision Architecture
At the deepest level, Fortune’s Formula is about building a rational way to act when the future cannot be known. Poundstone connects Kelly’s formula to broader ideas about entropy, probability, and the structure of decision-making. Entropy, in information theory, measures uncertainty. The more uncer...
From Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
Why Overbetting Destroys Smart People
One of the book’s most sobering lessons is that intelligence alone does not protect anyone from ruin. In fact, many highly intelligent people fail precisely because they overestimate their edge and overbet. Poundstone repeatedly returns to the unforgiving arithmetic of compounding: large losses are ...
From Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
About William Poundstone
William Poundstone is an American author and science writer known for his works on psychology, economics, and game theory. His books, including 'Fortune's Formula' and 'Gaming the Vote', combine rigorous research with accessible storytelling to explain complex ideas in human decision-making and rati...
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William Poundstone is an American author and science writer known for his works on psychology, economics, and game theory. His books, including 'Fortune's Formula' and 'Gaming the Vote', combine rigorous research with accessible storytelling to explain complex ideas in human decision-making and rati...
William Poundstone is an American author and science writer known for his works on psychology, economics, and game theory. His books, including 'Fortune's Formula' and 'Gaming the Vote', combine rigorous research with accessible storytelling to explain complex ideas in human decision-making and rationality.
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William Poundstone is an American author and science writer known for his works on psychology, economics, and game theory. His books, including 'Fortune's Formula' and 'Gaming the Vote', combine rigorous research with accessible storytelling to explain complex ideas in human decision-making and rationality.
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