On 'Representativeness' - A fundamental statistical strategy

In the tradition of Kahneman and Tversky some interesting heuristics have been outlined and discussed, that might explain and predict failures in probabilistic situations. In a series of examples we will give a short description of some of these intuitive strategies. The so called representativeness heuristic is discussed at more depth. It is linked to the idea of quota sampling. Random sampling is nothing but a trick to have a good chance of getting representative samples. All in all the representativeness idea is shown to be a fundamental statistical idea.