John List
Taking Economic Theory to the Field
Intro
John List is a revolutionary experimenter whose unique methods and ideas have changed how the field of economics functions. Alongside his close friend and colleague Steven Levitt, List has committed to studying the way people behave in the real world, instead of understanding economics as a theory-based field. His field experiments are far reaching and span across multiple different phenomena; without even knowing it, you may have been involved in some of List’s research. He has conducted formal experiments and informal research on popular phone game Candy Crush, rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft, and people’s behavior when travelling on United Airlines.1
List’s insights into human behavior have enabled policymakers to use real-life data to be able to better address society’s issues. His atypical way of approaching economics has helped provide answers to problems that have long confounded economists, behavioral scientists, environmental scientists, and philanthropists.
Experimentation should be used in environments that are messy; and I think the profession has had it exactly backwards for decades.
- John List, in a 2012 interview with Region Focus2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
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.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
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.
