Cristina Bicchieri

Bicchieri pioneered work on counterfactuals and belief-revision in games, and the consequences of relaxing the common knowledge assumption. Her contributions include axiomatic models of players' theory of the game and the proof that—in a large class of games—a player's theory of the game is consistent only if the player's knowledge is limited. An important consequence of assuming bounded knowledge is that it allows for more intuitive solutions to familiar games such as the finitely repeated prisoner's dilemma or the chain-store paradox. Bicchieri has also devised mechanical procedures (algorithms) that allow players to compute solutions for games of perfect and imperfect information. Devising such procedures is particularly important for Artificial Intelligence applications, since interacting software agents have to be programmed to play a variety of 'games'.

Bicchieri has served as a consultant to UNICEF since 2008, and she has advised various NGOs and other international organizations on social norms and how to deal with them when combating negative social practices. Her work on social norms has been adopted by UNICEF in its campaigns to eliminate practices that violate human rights.

She was knighted Cavaliere Ordine al Merito della Republica Italiana in 2007.

Bicchieri was born in Milan, Italy. She received her Laurea in Philosophy, summa cum laude, from the University of Milan in 1974, and her PhD in Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University in 1984. Before moving to the University of Pennsylvania she taught in the program of Philosophy and Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, in the Philosophy department at Notre Dame University and in the departments of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.

Cristina Bicchieri (born 1950) is an Italian–American philosopher. She is the S.J.P. Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of Legal Studies in the Wharton School, and director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program. She has worked on problems in the philosophy of social science, rational choice and game theory. More recently, her work has focused on the nature and evolution of social norms, and the design of behavioral experiments to test under which conditions norms will be followed. She is a leader in the field of behavioral ethics and is the director of the Behavioral Ethics Lab (BeLab) at the University of Pennsylvania.