Richard H. Thaler is a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he directs the Center for Decision Research — an institutional home that carries some irony, given that Chicago was the intellectual fortress of the rational-actor tradition he spent his career challenging. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017 for his contributions to behavioral economics, and is widely regarded as one of the field's founders.
His collaboration with the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, beginning in the 1970s, supplied much of the theoretical machinery for his work, and Kahneman was a co-author on several of the foundational fairness and endowment-effect experiments. Thaler served as president of the American Economic Association in 2015 — an appointment that measured how far the ideas had traveled from the margins.
Beyond Misbehaving, he is best known for Nudge, written with Cass Sunstein and published in 2009, which turned behavioral findings into a practical framework for policy and has shaped the design of retirement plans, organ donation registries, and tax administration in numerous countries. His earlier collection The Winner's Curse gathered his columns documenting anomalies that standard theory could not explain. He has also advised behavioral insights units in government, including the British team behind the tax letter experiments, and appeared briefly in the film The Big Short explaining the hot-hand fallacy alongside Selena Gomez — a cameo that captures something of his approach to making the subject accessible.
