Author
Richard H. Thaler
The economist who put the actual human back into economics and won the Nobel prize for it.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Richard Thaler is a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and one of the founders of behavioural economics. From the 1980s he collected anomalies, cases where real people did not behave as economic theory said they should, and built a field around them with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as collaborators.
Nudge, written with Cass Sunstein in 2008, applied the field to policy: since people will be influenced by any design, design should be chosen well. His memoir Misbehaving tells the story of the field. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017 for his contributions to behavioural economics.
The signature
Thaler writes with a joke never far away and a lifelong interest in the gap between the rational chooser of the textbooks and the person who forgets to change the default.