Richard Thaler
![Richard Thaler](/assets/img/authors/richard-thaler.jpg)
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...
cancer papers picking predicting school students subjects survival
There have been hundreds of papers on subjects from picking students for a school to predicting the survival of cancer patients.
money ties gold
Why tie to gold? Why not 1982 Bordeaux?
differences car mind
Investors must keep in mind that there's a difference between a good company and a good stock. After all, you can buy a good car but pay too much for it.
retirement credit debt
Maybe you'll take the cash out. So a credit card company or a bank that goes into the business of saying we're going to be the broker, we're going to sell you a mortgage that you're going to be able to pay off, we're going to help you reduce your credit card debt, we're going to help you save for retirement, we're going to put you into mutual funds that have low fees rather than high fees.
optimistic skills people
People exaggerate their own skills. they are optimistic about their prospects and overconfident about their guesses, including which managers to pick.
retirement able should
Every American worker should be able to save for retirement via payroll deductions.
rare-events swans giving
So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.
should-have years long
The reason is they failed to learned the primary lesson we should have learned from when Long Term Capital Management went belly up ten years ago. That is, investments that seem uncorrelated can be correlated simply because we're interested in it.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.