Richard Thaler

Richard H. Thaler

Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished
Service Professor of Behavioral
Science and Economics

Elephant LogoBiography

Richard H. Thaler is the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics. 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. Thaler is the former faculty director of the Center for Decision Research (CDR), a Governing Board member of the CDR, and the co-director (with Robert Shiller) of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research.