| Birth | September 12, 1945 |
|---|---|
| Nationality |  United States |
| Institution | University of Chicago Booth School of Business |
| Field | Behavioral finance |
| Alma mater | University of Rochester (M.Sc. 1970, Ph.D. 1974) Case Western Reserve University (B.A. 1967) |
| Influences | Daniel Kahneman |
| Influenced | George Loewenstein |
| Information at IDEAS/RePEc | |
Richard H. Thaler (born September 12, 1945, in East Orange, New Jersey) is an American economist. 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.
Contents |
Career
As economist and advisor
Thaler presides as an in-house expert who regularly consulted with Barack Obama's top economic advisor for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, Austan Goolsbee[1].
Daniel Kahneman has cited his joint work with Thaler as a "major factor" in his receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics, saying
"The committee cited me 'for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science'. Although I do not wish to renounce any credit for my contribution, I should say that in my view the work of integration was actually done mostly by Thaler and the group of young economists that quickly began to form around him."[2]
As educator
He currently teaches at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and is an associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has organized a series of behavioral finance seminars along with Robert Shiller, another behavioral finance expert at the Yale School of Management. Previously he taught at Cornell University and the MIT Sloan School of Management
As writer
Books
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.
Most recently Thaler is coauthor, with Cass R. 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.
Other writing
Thaler gained some attention in the field of economics for publishing a regular column in the Journal of Economic Perspectives from 1987 to 1990 titled Anomalies[3], in which he documented individual instances of economic behavior that seemed to violate traditional microeconomic theory.
In one of his most recent papers [4], together with three Dutch economists Thaler has analyzed the choices of contestants appearing in the popular TV game show Deal or No Deal and found support for behavioralists' claims of path-dependent risk attitudes.
Other work
Thaler also is the founder of an asset management firm [5] that enables a select group of investors to capitalize on cognitive biases such as the endowment effect, loss aversion and status quo bias.
See also
References
- ^ Noam Scheiber (March 12, 2008). The Audacity of Data. The New Republic. http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=4d40a39e-8f57-4054-bd99-94bc9d19be1a. Retrieved May 3, 2009.
- ^ Daniel Kahneman-Autobiography
- ^ Anomalies
- ^ Deal or No Deal? Decision Making Under Risk in a Large-Payoff Game Show
- ^ Fuller & Thaler Asset Management, Inc
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
