Dear RSF Staff and Class of 2017-18,

Please join me in welcoming Margaret Olivia Sage Scholar and former RSF Trustee Richard Thaler for a seminar entitled, “When Nudges are Forever (Who Needs Diamonds).” The talk will be held in the Library this Wednesday, April 11th, from 11 AM to 12.30 PM.

Richard H. Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago, and the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics. Thaler studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is the director of the Center for Decision Research, and is the co-director (with Robert Shiller) of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Thaler is the co-author (with Cass R. Sunstein) of the global best seller Nudge (2008) in which the concepts of behavioral economics are used to tackle many of society’s major problems. In 2015 he published Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. He has authored or edited four other books: Quasi-Rational Economics, The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life, and Advances in Behavioral Finance (editor) Volumes I and II. He has published numerous articles in prominent journals such as the American Economics Review, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Political Economy.

Thaler is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Finance Association and the Econometrics Society, and in 2015 served as the President of the American Economic Association.

I hope everyone is looking forward—as I am—to what will no doubt be an interesting and productive discussion.

Warmest regards,

Eric Bias
Program Assistant
Russell Sage Foundation