University of Chicago’s Richard H. Thaler (PhD University of Rochester) is the winner … always amusing when the winner gets woken up early in the morning and has to answer press questions.
Richard H. Thaler (/ˈθeɪlər/; born September 12, 1945) is 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.
He is perhaps best known as a theorist in behavioral finance, and for his collaboration with Daniel Kahneman and others in further defining that field.
Thaler is coauthor, with Cass Sunstein, of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008). Nudge discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. "People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement!" Thaler and Sunstein write. "We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself." Thaler and his co-author coined the term choice architect.
Thaler also is the founder of an asset management firm, Fuller & Thaler Asset Management,[6] that says a group of investors will capitalize on cognitive biases such as the endowment effect, loss aversion and status quo bias.
Thaler cameoed as himself in the 2015 film The Big Short,[7] alongside Selena Gomez to explain the hot-hand fallacy.
The more interesting question is whether we really can have mental accounts in a world of chocolate, lemons, or tulips. At least there is a recognition of human agency. Swedish TV asked him whether Trump should be affected by the hot-hand fallacy. Thaler replied politely that Trump should watch The Big Short, in which Thaler plays himself. Cass Sunstein had a more diverse bettor’s list including Thaler:
Richard H. Thaler, University of Chicago. Over recent decades, the rise of behavioral economics has been the most interesting development in economic theory. More than anyone else, Thaler has been responsible for that development.
He has shown that in concrete ways, people do not act as predicted by standard economic theory. Far from seeing money as fungible, people put their cash in separate “mental accounts” (mortgage money, vacation money, retirement money). Investors overreact to unexpected news events. Human beings care about fairness -- and they are willing to pay something to punish people who have been unfair. People are planners as well as doers, and when they are planning, they might try to foil their own doing (as, for example, by keeping high-calorie foods out of the house).
It’s true that with respect to Thaler, I’m biased. He’s a friend as well as a co-author. But no one can doubt that his influence can be seen in the work of governments all over the world, as officials use his findings to increase retirement savings, cut poverty, boost employment, increase safety on the highways and improve health. (Thaler is the pioneer, but worthy co-recipients would be Colin Camerer of the California Institute of Technology, Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University and Matthew Rabin of Harvard.)
One thing to note is that there is not an official Nobel Prize in Economics. There is, instead, a “Prize in Economic Sciences” awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank) in memory of Alfred Nobel. Economics was not one of the five original disciplines that Nobel had in mind when he established the prizes in his will.
Regardless, the Memorial Prize in Economics is treated the same as the original five. The winner attends the same ceremony, receives a diploma and a gold medal from the Swedish monarch, and banks the same cash prize (9 million Swedish crowns, or A$1.1 million).
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There have been 78 previous winners of the cash prize and medal which has become a significant honour for economists since it was initiated in 1968. Women are significantly underrepresented compared with some of the other Nobel prizes, such as those given for peace or literature. The American political economist Elinor Ostrom, who died in 2012, remains the only woman to have won the award. She shared the prize in 2009 with fellow American academic Oliver Williamson for her work exploring how people manage collective resources.
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2017 Nobel Peace Prize
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons".