Yair Tauman

Yair Tauman (born January 20, 1948) is an Israeli economist and game theorist who has built a parallel career as a serial angel investor. He earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in mathematics and statistics and his Ph.D. in mathematics — supervised by Nobel laureate Robert Aumann — all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His academic career spans some of the world's leading institutions: the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University (1980–1987), the economics department at Ohio State University (1987–1990), and Tel Aviv University for roughly 25 years (1983–2008). He is a Professor of Economics at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and has directed the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory for about two decades. His research centers on game theory and industrial organization, with publications in journals including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Theory, Games and Economic Behavior, and the RAND Journal of Economics.

In Israel, Tauman is closely tied to Reichman University (formerly the Interdisciplinary Center, IDC Herzliya). He served as dean of the Arison School of Business (2010–2011) and is a founding dean of the Adelson School of Entrepreneurship. Since 2009 he has been academic director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program, the university's flagship program that pairs top students with mentors to launch real startups — a role that places him at the center of Israel's early-stage founder pipeline. He has organized the long-running International Summer Conferences in Game Theory (at Stony Brook) for more than three decades, and the 28th edition was held in his honor alongside Pradeep Dubey.

Beyond academia, Tauman has held corporate board and governance roles, including serving as a director at Bank Hapoalim (from 2011) and on boards such as Radware, Digi-Block, and ADVFN. He is the father of MIT cryptographer Yael Tauman Kalai.

• Invests as an individual angel, typically at seed/early stage, frequently alongside other prominent Israeli angels and syndicates (e.g., Gigi Levy, Kaedan Capital, the AfterDox angel group).
• Sector interests cluster around FinTech/financial services, enterprise and business-productivity software (SaaS), and medical devices/surgical technology.
• Strong bias toward Israeli founders and startups, consistent with his role mentoring and backing companies emerging from Reichman University's Zell program.
• As a game theorist and entrepreneurship educator, he brings a strategic/economic lens to markets and competitive dynamics — a distinctive value-add beyond capital.