Richard Thaler
Richard Thaler
Richard H. Thaleris an American economist and the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business...
Richard Thaler quotes about
thinking people risk
I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.
thinking law drunk
When should we nudge and when should we shove, I think, it's a political judgment. Obviously in some situations we need shoves, we need laws. Fraud is against the law, murder is against the law, drunk-driving is against the law. We don't need just nudges.
nudge attention environment
So, what's a nudge? A nudge is some small feature of the environment that attracts our attention and alters our behavior.
assumption figures plans
The assumption that everybody will figure out how much they have to save and then will just implement that plan is obviously preposterous.
retirement self saving
Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.
empowerment easy empirical-evidence
I'm all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn't work. That's why I say make it easy.
over-you friendly use
It would be much more consumer friendly for them to beep you when you swipe your card that says, uh-oh you're over your limit, are you sure you want to use that?
over-you honor credit
he card companies will often, as a courtesy, honor that credit card, but hit you with a penalty. And you keep swiping your card for $3 at Starbucks for your latté, and you're getting hit with a $25 penalty because it's over your credit limit.
long people balance
If rather than setting the minimum balance as the lowest possible amount, so we keep people in debt for as long as possible, we raise the minimum payment and encourage people to pay off their credit cards, we're going to make less money, but we're going to have costumers that are more solvent.
thinking people balance
Is there a market for somebody selling a credit card that helps people pay down their balances? I think the question is yes. But it would have to be sold by a bank that's really willing to invest in being a trusted partner with its consumers, because they will make less money on each consumer.
thinking giving risk
I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.
retirement people important
Everyone's lost a lot of money on their 401k plans. I've heard some people calling them 201k plans. So it's even more important to get people to be saving more for retirement. Behavioral economics has helped us learn a lot about how to do that.
thinking incentives lessons
I think we also have learned the lesson that we have to have better incentive structures.
saving want enrollment
In a typical 401k plan, when you first become eligible you get a big pile of forms and you're told, fill out these forms if you want to join. Tell us how much amount you've saved and how you want to invest the money. In, under automatic enrollment you get that same pile of forms but the top page says, if you don't fill out these forms, we're going to enroll you anyway and we're going to enroll you at this saving rate and in these investments.