Richard Thaler

Richard H. Thaler (born 1945) is an American economist who helped transform the study of human decision-making from an idealized exercise in expected utility theory into an empirical science of actual behavior. Awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Thaler is the architect of several foundational concepts in behavioral finance and the co-author — with Cass Sunstein — of the influential book Nudge, which brought behavioral insights into policy design. But Thaler's deeper contribution is methodological: he demonstrated that the anomalies of human choice are not noise to be filtered out but signal to be theorized.

Thaler's career is defined by a sustained assault on the assumption of rational choice. Where traditional economics asked What