Steven Levitt

Incentives are Everything

PublishedApril 1, 2021
CategoryEconomics
Reading time12 min read
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Intro

Steven Levitt is an economist, innovative thinker, TED-talk speaker, best-selling author, and above all, a brave thinker whose interest in the real world has helped revolutionize the application of economics for over a decade. By discovering  links between unique disciplines, Levitt has been able to take economic theory beyond textbook pages and explore the ways  economics interacts with psychology, sociology and behavioral science.

At the top of Steven Levitt’s impressive resume is his best-selling book, Freakonomics, published in 2005. Freakonomics is not just a book - it is a way of thinking that has inspired subsequent books and an empire. Thanks to Levitt’s thinking outside-the-box approach, his work has been influential in a number of fields: the social sciences, political sciences, the economics of crime and the study of law.1

“

Economics is about going into the world and finding puzzles and thinking about how understanding incentives of markets might help us get a better grasp of what’s really going on.


- Steven Levitt on the EconTalk podcast.2

About the Authors

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Dan Pilat

Managing Director

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

A smiling man stands in an office, wearing a dark blazer and black shirt, with plants and glass-walled rooms in the background.

Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Managing Director & Co-Founder

Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.

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