A behavioral economist and collaborator of Kahneman and Tversky’s. Thaler coined the different classifications of Econs and Humans, which draw a distinction between the way economists view people and the way psychologists view people. As a graduate student, Thaler discovered people’s behavior was often inconsistent with accepted economic theory, and was attracted by Kahneman and Tversky’s work on prospect theory to help explain some of those inconsistencies. Together, the three men explored different behavioral economics principles like the endowment effect and broad framing, significantly advancing and defining the field.
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Richard Thaler Character Timeline in Thinking, Fast and Slow
The timeline below shows where the character Richard Thaler appears in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 3, Chapter 20
In 1984, Kahneman, Tversky, and a friend named Richard Thaler visited a Wall Street firm. Kahneman remembers being struck by the stock market and wondering...
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Part 4, Chapter 25
...as neither fully rational, nor completely selfish, and as anything but stable. Behavioral economist Richard Thaler designates these ideas of people using the names Econs and Humans.
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Part 4, Chapter 27
Behavioral economics got its start with Richard Thaler in the early 1970s, who was a graduate student at the time. He liked to...
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Thaler spent a year at Stanford while Kahneman and Tversky completed their work. During this period,...
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Kahneman, Thaler, and a local economist named Jack Knetsch, designed an experiment that would highlight the contrast...
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Part 4, Chapter 28
Thaler, Knetsch, and Kahneman next designed a survey to examine people’s view of fairness in economic...
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Part 4, Chapter 31
Kahneman concludes the chapter with an anecdote from Richard Thaler, who had a discussion with 25 managers of a large company. He asked them to...
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Part 4, Chapter 34
In an essay, Richard Thaler describes another example: the credit card lobby pushed against gas stations that charged more if...
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...gallons. The mpg frame is wrong, and Cass Sunstein, a psychologist who worked with Richard Thaler, helped to change policy that now requires fuel economy information to be printed in gallons-per-mile...
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Conclusions
In Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge, they address the dilemma of how to help people make...
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