Richard H. Thaler

Richard Thaler is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics and director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2015, Thaler will be the President of the American Economics Association.

Thaler is the co-author (with Cass R. Sunstein) of the global best seller Nudge, in which the concepts of behavioural economics are used to tackle many of society’s major problems. He has advised both United States President Barack Obama and United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron, and is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of behavioural economics and finance. Thaler specialises in 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 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. He has authored or edited four other books: Quasi-Rational Economics, The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life, and Advances in Behavioral Finance (editor) Volumes I and II.

Before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1995, Thaler taught at the University of Rochester and Cornell, as well as visiting stints at the University of British Columbia, the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.