Abraham Neyman

The Game Theory Society released, in March 2016, a special issue of the International Journal of Game Theory in honour of Neyman, "in recognition of his important contributions to game theory". A Festschrift conference in Neyman's honour was held at Hebrew University in June 2015, on the occasion of Neyman's 66th birthday. He gave the inaugural von-Neumann lecture at the 2008 Congress of the Game Theory Society as well as delivering it at the 2012 World Congress on behalf of the recently deceased Jean-Francois Mertens.

Neyman previously served (2005–8) as director at Tradus (previously named QXL). He also held a directorship (2004–5) at Gilat Satellite Networks. In 1999, Neyman co-founded Bidorbuy, the first online auction company to operate in India and in South Africa, and serves as the chairman of the board. Since 2013, he has held a directorship at the Israeli bank Mizrahi-Tefahot.

Neyman has made many contributions to the theory of repeated games. One idea that appears, in different contexts, in some of his papers, is that the model of an infinitely repeated game serves also as a powerful paradigm for a long finitely repeated game. A related insight appears in a 1999 paper, where he showed that in a long finitely repeated game, an exponentially small deviation from common knowledge of the number of repetitions is enough to dramatically alter the equilibrium analysis, producing a folk-theorem-like result.

Neyman has been a fellow of the Econometric Society since 1989.

Neyman has had 12 graduate students complete Ph.D. theses under his supervision, five at Stony Brook University and seven at the Hebrew University. Neyman has also served as the Game Theory Area Editor for the journal Mathematics of Operations Research (1987–1993) and on the editorial board for Games and Economic Behavior (1993–2001) and the International Journal of Game Theory (2001–2007).

Neyman has been professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University since 1982, including serving as the chairman of the institute of mathematics 1992–1994, as well as holding a professorship in economics, 1982–1990. He has been a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University since its inception in 1991. He held various positions at Stony Brook University of New York, 1985–2001. He has also held positions and has been visiting scholar at Cornell University, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard University, and Ohio State University.

His Ph.D. thesis won two prizes from the Hebrew University: the 1977 Abraham Urbach prize for distinguished thesis in mathematics and the 1979 Aharon Katzir prize (for the best Ph. D. thesis in the Faculties of Exact Science, Mathematics, Agriculture and Medicine). In addition, Neyman won the Israeli under 20 chess championship in 1966.

Neyman received his BSc in mathematics in 1970 and his MSc in mathematics in 1972 from the Hebrew University. His MSc thesis was on the subject of “The Range of a Vector Measure” and was supervised by Joram Lindenstrauss. His PhD thesis, "Values of Games with a Continuum of Players," was completed under Robert Aumann in 1977.

Abraham Neyman (born June 14, 1949, Israel) is an Israeli mathematician and game theorist, Professor of Mathematics at the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality and the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He served as president of the Israeli Chapter of the Game Theory Society (2014–2018).