Matthew Rabin
A Pioneer of Behavioral Economics
Intro
Matthew Rabin is one of the most important names in behavioral economics. Beginning his academic career in the 1990s, Rabin has consistently been an open advocate for behavioral economics. He understands that traditional economics, whilst having its uses, is still severely limited when it comes to explaining how people actually act instead of how they should act according to rationality.
As a result, Rabin has spent his career trying to better understand economic behavior by researching the psychological causes behind the fact that people veer from making decisions that maximize utility. Thanks to Rabin’s relentless investigation as to why anomalies exist in research based on traditional economics ideologies, he has been able to use psychological phenomena to address the fact that these anomalies are not just anomalies. He suggests that economists have long made excuses for these anomalies, which he famously termed “explain-away-tions”1 and tries to get to the bottom of real-life human behavior. His charisma and dedication to the field have enabled behavioral economics to gain credence and popularity.
Many young economists have been worried that studying these topics is a risky career path; they now have recognition that behavioral economics is no longer considered radical
– Richard Thaler discussing Matthew Rabin’s influence in popularizing behavioral economics and incorporating it into mainstream theory, in The New York Times.2
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.
