Response to Nick Bingham’s com- ments on an early draft of our book Probability and Finance: It’s Only a Game!

In September 1998, the Danish Network on the History and Philosophy of Mathematics (http://mmf.ruc.dk/mathnet/) hosted a conference on the history and philosophy of probability at Roskilde University. Both of us were invited to speak at this conference, and the organizers even extended their hospitality to enable the two of us to take a few more days in Copenhagen after the conference to continue the collaboration that led to our book, Probability and Finance: It’s Only a Game (Wiley, 2001). Glenn Shafer’s main contribution to the conference was a talk based on a draft chapter for the book, containing material that was later incorporated into Chapters 1 and 2. Another participant at the meeting, Nick Bingham, Professor of Statistics at Brunel University, was very engaged by Shafer’s talk and responded to it energetically. Most of the presentations at the conference were subsequently published as articles in a volume edited by the organizers: Probability Theory: Philosophy, Recent History and Relations to Science. This collection includes articles by both of us, but unfortunately it does not include an article based on the talk by Shafer that elicited Bingham’s comments. We have two excuses for this. At first, we worried that inclusion of the chapter might compromise our effort to attract a publisher for the book. Then, after we obtained a contract