Richard Thaler · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Founder of behavioural economics — mental accounting, the endowment effect, fairness and self-control — and co-author of Nudge (2008); Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2017
12 September 1945, East Orange, New Jersey, United States
Chatham (New Jersey) · Rochester · Ithaca · Chicago
Richard Thaler is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Founder of behavioural economics — mental accounting, the endowment effect, fairness and self-control — and co-author of Nudge (2008); Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2017
Origins and early life
Richard Thaler was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on 12 September 1945, the eldest of three sons of Alan Thaler, an actuary at the Prudential, and Roslyn Thaler, who had taught in an elementary school. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, reporting his prize, described him as Jewish and born in East Orange; he grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, and his parents sent him to Newark Academy after an undistinguished start as a pupil.
He studied at Case Western Reserve University and at the University of Rochester, taking his doctorate in 1974 with a thesis that put a value on saving a life from the extra pay people demand for dangerous jobs.
Work and career
Meanwhile he kept a list on his office blackboard of ways in which people behaved against economic theory, and in 1976 a psychologist he met at a conference pointed him to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. He spent the year 1977–1978 near them at Stanford, a year he says changed his life, then taught at Cornell for eighteen years and moved to the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business in 1995. His work on mental accounting, on the endowment effect, by which people value the same item more once they own it, on fairness and on self-control built a bridge between economics and psychology.
In 2008 he and the law professor Cass Sunstein published Nudge, whose title is the word he coined for ways of presenting choices that help people decide, such as enrolling employees in pension savings by default while leaving them free to opt out. He was president of the American Economic Association in 2015, the year he published Misbehaving, his account of how behavioural economics was built.
Recognition
The 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to him alone “for his contributions to behavioural economics”, and a Cornell coffee mug from his endowment-effect experiments went to the Nobel Museum.
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Source: Wikipedia — Richard Thaler / NobelPrize.org Economic Sciences 2017
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Founder of behavioural economics — mental accounting, the endowment effect, fairness and self-control — and co-author of Nudge (2008); Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2017
Source: Wikipedia — Richard Thaler / NobelPrize.org Economic Sciences 2017
