This book brings together a collection of classic research papers on the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. This book will serve as the authoritative reference in the field of evidential reasoning and an important archival reference in a wide range of areas including uncertainty reasoning in artificial intelligence and decision making in economics, engineering, and management. The carefully selected contributions are grouped into seven sections, including conceptual foundations, theoretical perspectives, theoretical extensions, alternative interpretations, and applications to artificial intelligence, decision-making, and statistical inferences. The book also includes a foreword by Dempster and Shafer reflecting the development of the theory in the last forty years, and an introduction describing the basic elements of the theory and how each paper contributes to the field.