Richard Thaler

Richard Thaler was the economist who made behavioral economics economics. Beginning in the late 1970s, he took Kahneman and Tversky's psychological findings — anchoring, loss aversion, mental accounting, the endowment effect — and demonstrated their economic consequences in markets where rational-choice theory had long assumed they were irrelevant. His 2008 collaboration with Cass Sunstein on Nudge established choice architecture as a tool of public policy. His 2017 Nobel Prize recognized that the behavioral findings Kahneman and Tversky had demonstrated experimentally operated at scale in actual markets. Thaler's role in the Kahneman story is that of the economist who built the bridge — the scholar who took the psychological findings across the disciplinary boundary and demonstrated they mattered where most behavioral scientists had assumed they did not.