George Ainslie

George W. Ainslie is an American psychiatrist, psychologist and behavioral economist, chief psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and clinical professor of psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine. Unusually for a psychiatrist he carried out experimental animal research in operant conditioning with Howard Rachlin, studying intertemporal choice in pigeons, and was the first to show experimentally the preference reversal in favor of the more immediate reward as the choice point moves closer in time. He explained this through hyperbolic discounting of future rewards. In his 1992 book Picoeconomics he used the idea, together with facts about addiction from his clinical work, to argue that parts or aspects of the personality are in conflict over control of behavior. His work, along with that of Drazen Prelec, helped bring operant conditioning data into decision research and challenged rational choice theory in economics, and his multiple-selves thinking influenced Richard Thaler's account of saving.