MEET RICHARD THALER

Richard Thaler, Director of the Center for Decision Research, is best known as a theorist in behavioral finance, and for his collaboration with Daniel Kahneman and others in further defining such field.

Richard Thaler studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making, which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human.

He is Co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research project on Behavioral Economics and member of the American Academy of Arts, and served as Vice-president of the American Economic Association and fellow of the American Finance Association.

Thaler is co-author of the global best-seller "Nudge", in which concepts of behavioral economics are used to tackle many of society's major problems, and has authored or edited other books including "Quasi-Rational Economics", "The Winner's Curse", and "Advances in Behavioral Finance I and II".

Before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1995 he worked as Professor at the University of Rochester and Cornell University, and as visiting Professor at University of British Columbia, Russell Sage Foundation, MIT's Sloan School of Management, and Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences.

Richard Thaler holds a B.A from Case Western Reserve University, a master's degree and a Ph.D from the University of Rochester. He has published a number of articles in prominent journals such as the American Economics Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Political Economy.

SPEAKING TOPICS

Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Nudge is about choices - how we make them and how we can make better ones. Drawing on decades of research in the fields of behavioral science and economics, Richard Thaler offers a new perspective on preventing the countless mistakes we make -bad personal investments, consumption of unhealthy foods, neglect of our natural resources- and shows us how sensible "choice architecture" can successfully nudge people toward the best decisions.

Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life
Richard Thaler challenges the received economic wisdom by revealing many of the paradoxes that abound even in the most painstakingly constructed transactions. He presents literate, challenging, and often funny examples of such anomalies as why most shoppers will save on one appliance only to pass up the identical savings on another, and why sports fans who wouldn't pay more than $200 for a Super Bowl ticket wouldn't sell one they own for less than $400.

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