Daniel Ellsberg graduated from Harvard in In 1952 with a B.A. degree summa cum laude in Economics. HIs senior honors thesis, “Theories of Decision-making Under Uncertainty: The Contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern,” led to articles being published in the Economic Journal and the American Economics Review.
Ellsberg studied economics for a year at King’s College, Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He then served in the U.S. Marine Corps as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander. This included six months with the Sixth Fleet during the Suez Crisis. After three years in the Marines, from 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he pursued independent graduate study in decision theory.
Later, in 1962 while at the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, published nearly four decades later by Routledge (2001). An article presenting the core of the thesis, “Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms,” was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1961. It has given rise to an extensive literature, with over 10,000 scholarly citations of the so-called “Ellsberg Paradox.”