Richard H. Thaler

Richard H. Thaler (/ˈθeɪlər/; born September 12, 1945) is an American economist and the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

The official press release announcing that Thaler was the 2017 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences stated that he "has incorporated psychologically realistic assumptions into analyses of economic decision-making. By exploring the consequences of limited rationality, social preferences, and lack of self-control, he has shown how these human traits systematically affect individual decisions as well as market outcomes." After learning that he had won the Nobel Prize, Thaler said that his most important contribution to economics "was the recognition that economic agents are human, and that economic models have to incorporate that.

Books
He is perhaps best known as a theorist in behavioral finance, and for his collaboration with Daniel Kahneman and others in further defining that field. In 2017, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics.When discussing its selection of Thaler to receive the Nobel Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reasoned that his "contributions have built a bridge between the economic and psychological analyses of individual decision-making. His empirical findings and theoretical insights have been instrumental in creating the new and rapidly expanding field of behavioral economics.
Thaler has written a number of books intended for a lay reader on the subject of behavioral finance, including Quasi-rational Economics and The Winner's Curse, the latter of which contains many of his Anomalies columns revised and adapted for a popular audience. His leitmotif is that market-based approaches are incomplete: he is quoted as saying, "conventional economics assumes that people are highly-rational – super-rational – and unemotional. They can calculate like a computer and have no self-control problems."

Thaler is coauthor, with Cass Sunstein, of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008). Nudge discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. "People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement!" Thaler and Sunstein write. "We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself." Thaler and his co-author coined the term choice architect.[citation needed]

1992. The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.1993. Advances in Behavioral Finance. New York: Russell Sage Foundation
1994. Quasi Rational Economics. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
2005. Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volume II (Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics). Princeton: Princeton University Press
2015. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company

In 2015 Thaler authored Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics