Richard Thaler

Bringing economics into the real world of human decision-making

PublishedNovember 30, 2020
CategoryEconomics ¡ Psychology
Reading time13 min read
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Intro

As the winner of the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, it goes without saying that Richard Thaler has made several key contributions to behavioral economics. His work is particularly noteworthy due to the ways in which it integrates the fields of economics and psychology. Since the early days of his career, Thaler has been fascinated by the anomalies of economic life; the financial decisions people make that cannot be explained through understanding humans as rational actors. In order to explain these phenomena, Thaler had to challenge existing theories and endure the backlash that followed. It may have been an uphill battle but today he is recognized as one of the leading figures in his field.1

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A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.


– Richard H. Thalerin Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

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.

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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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