Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, considered one of the founding fathers of behavioral economics, won the 2017 Nobel prize in economics for his influential work on how human nature affects markets. Thaler won the $1.1-million prize for “understanding the psychology of economics,” Swedish Academy of Sciences secretary Goran Hansson said. Although it may seem like an obvious feat, the truth is economists were once fond of thinking about humans as robots who always made choices that maximized their outcomes. But Thaler showed how very human traits, such as lack of self-control, habits, and fear of losing pushed people toward decisions that were not the most advantageous in the long term. [...]
Thaler is perhaps best known as one of the main proponents of “nudge theory,” the idea that small interventions on how things are presented in the environment can push people to make certain decisions that would benefit them or their environment. The book he co-authored with professor Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, pushed that idea to the mainstream when it was published in 2008. That book had a wide-ranging effect on policymakers as it explained things like how you could get people to eat more healthy foods simply by improving their placement on supermarket shelves and get them to save for retirement by automatically enrolling them in 401(k) plans.
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