Richard Thaler

Richard H. Thaler (born September 12, 1945) is an American economist and the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a leading theorist of behavioral economics, the field that brings psychological findings into economic decision making. He collaborated with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, spending 1977 to 1978 at Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1974. His best known contributions include work on the endowment effect, mental accounting, myopic loss aversion with Shlomo Benartzi, and choice architecture and libertarian paternalism, set out with Cass Sunstein in the book Nudge. He was president of the American Economic Association in 2015, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, and in 2017 received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for building a bridge between economic and psychological analyses of individual decision making.