Richard Thaler

Richard Thaler spent the academic year 1994-95 as a visiting professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management so that he could spend time with France Leclerc, a faculty there in the marketing department. That year they both joined the then University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and later the two also got married.

Leclerc is his second wife, and he has three children. His wife later left her teaching job and now identifies herself as a traveler, a photographer and a storyteller, who travels around the world documenting different cultures.

He was an informal adviser to President Barack Obama's administration as well as his re-election campaign in 2012. He was also a formal adviser to the "Behavioural Insight Team" in Prime Minister David Cameron's administration in the United Kingdom.

Richard H. Thaler was born on September 12, 1945 in East Orange, New Jersey, to Alan M. Thaler and Roslyn (Melnikoff). He was born into a Jewish family and grew up with two younger brothers.

His father was an actuary at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey, while his mother was a school teacher turned stay-at-home-mom. His father wanted him to be an actuary like him, but he had decided early in his life not to be a businessman.

In 1967, he completed his graduation from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland with a degree in economics. He was initially interested in psychology, but settled on the more “practical” choice economics as it was easier to get jobs in this field.

After college, he attended the University of Rochester in New York, from where he earned his master’s degree in 1970. He also completed his Ph.D. in 1974 from there.

After completing his studies from the University of Rochester, Richard Thaler began his career as a professor there. From 1978 to 1995, he was a faculty at the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University and then shifted again to University of Chicago's Booth School of Business in 1995.

From 1987 to 1990, he regularly published the column titled 'Anomalies' in the 'Journal of Economic Perspectives', which earned him widespread attention in the field of economics. Through his extensive research, he aimed to record various separate instances of economic behavior that were in apparent violation of traditional microeconomic theory.

In 1992, he combined many of his 'Anomalies' columns from the 'Journal of Economic Perspectives' into the book, 'The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life'. The book, which adapted the contents of his columns for a popular audience, challenges the conventional economic theories by revealing the paradoxical nature of people's actual economic behaviors.

One of the earliest advocates of behavioral economics, he provided a standard reference to this new approach in finance via his 1993 book ‘Advances in Behavioral Finance’. He stated that the new approach in finance “entertains the possibility that some agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time”. In 2005, he published an updated version of the book, titled 'Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volume II (Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics)'.

In 1994, he released another book, ‘Quasi Rational Economics’, in which he questioned why standard economic models often fail to predict market behavior accurately. He stated that the failure is due to the unwillingness to take into account the biases that color human judgments.

Richard Thaler's 2008 book 'Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness' with Cass Sunstein is one of his best known works in the field of behavioral economics. The book was received by largely positive reviews and was named one of the best books of 2008 by 'The Economist'.