New Releases by Richard H. Thaler

Named one of Financial Times’s Best Books of 2025, that bestselling author Tim Hartford called "fun" and "nerdy in the best way" Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and rising star economist Alex O. Imas explore the past, present, and cutting-edge future in behavioral economics in The Winner’s Curse. Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no obvious motivation to do so? Why do we hold on to possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed? Over thirty years ago, Richard H. Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics in his seminal Anomalies column, written with collaborators including Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. These provocative articles challenged the fundamental idea at the heart of economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers, and provided the foundation for what became behavioral economics. That was then. Now, three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex O. Imas to write a new book with an original and creative format. Each chapter starts with an original Anomaly, retaining the spirit of its time stamp. Then, shifting to the present, the authors provide updates to each, asking how the original findings have held up and how the field has evolved since then. It turns out that the original findings not only hold up well, but they show up almost everywhere. Anomalies pop up in people’s decisions to save for retirement and how they carry outstanding credit card debt. Even experts fail to optimize. The key concept of loss aversion explains missed putts by PGA pros and the selection of which stocks to sell by portfolio managers. In this era of meme stocks and Dogecoin, it is hard to defend the view that financial markets are highly efficient. The good news, however, is that the anomalies have gotten funnier. With both readability and rigor, The Winner’s Curse is for anyone, from those with a cursory understanding of economics to fellow economists. Each chapter provides a key insight into human behavior so readers learn how to better understand the choices made by their friends, colleagues, and customers, and they might just become better at making decisions themselves. Only recommended for humans.

2017年諾貝爾經濟學獎得主、行為經濟學之父──理查．塞勒，所寫的「行為經濟學」最佳入門書！ 一章一個概念，帶您了解最基礎的觀念！ 這本書探究人類不理性的一面， 心理學＋經濟學，讓你更了解人性！ 這就是行為經濟學（Behavioral economics）—— 本書為現今熱門的「行為經濟學」、「行為財務學」的經典之作，書中研究人類決策的不理性面，所造成的矛盾與反常現象，後來被許多經濟學書籍反覆討論，例如《誰說人是理性的》、《蘋果橘子經濟學》等等。 本書用一些簡單、甚至很有趣的例子，來說明一些反常現象，例如： 拍賣競標的贏家，其實往往是輸家──「贏家的詛咒」現象； 賭徒在輸了一整天後，會孤注一擲，押在勝算最小（賠率最大）的標的上； 人們突然獲得一筆小錢，常常會花掉；但獲得一大筆意外之財，常常會存起來； 放棄一項物品所損失的效用，多於獲得它所帶來的效用──「損失趨避」現象； 足球迷最多願意付200美元買一張超級盃門票，但要他們出售手上的票，他們會開價至少400美元。 藉由許多有趣的實驗，「行為經濟學之父」塞勒剖析了人類不理性的決策及其原因，這些違背了理性自利、效用極大化，或是邏輯不一致的行為，可能提供了套利機會，更引發了行為經濟學的研究。本書囊括許多重要主題，包括：合作與公平觀念、賽局、拍賣競標、不同產業的薪資差異、損失趨避、現狀偏誤、偏好反轉、跨期選擇、心理帳戶、樂透及賽馬投注、股市的日曆效應、回歸平均值、股價能不能預測、外匯市場等等。 對於經濟學稍有涉獵的讀者，本書可以帶您進入經濟研究的廣闊世界。在實務上，也可提供企業行銷、個人消費與儲蓄、投資理財的深度思考。

Ogni giorno prendiamo decisioni sui temi più disparati: come investire i nostri soldi, cosa mangiare per cena, dove mandare i figli a scuola, con che mezzo di trasporto raggiungere il centro della città. Purtroppo facciamo spesso scelte sbagliate. Mangiamo troppo, usiamo la macchina quando potremmo andare a piedi, scegliamo il piano tariffario peggiore per il nostro telefonino o il mutuo meno conveniente per comprare una casa. Siamo esseri umani, non calcolatori perfettamente razionali, e siamo condizionati da troppe informazioni contrastanti, dalla complessità della vita quotidiana, dall'inerzia e dalla limitata forza di volontà. È per questo che abbiamo bisogno di un "pungolo", di una spinta gentile che ci indirizzi verso la scelta giusta: di un nudge, come l'hanno battezzato l'economista Richard Thaler e il giurista Cass Sunstein in questo libro. L'idea di Thaler e Sunstein è semplice ma geniale: per introdurre pratiche di buona cittadinanza, per aiutare le persone a scegliere il meglio per sé e per la società, occorre imparare a usare a fin di bene l'irrazionalità umana. I campi d'applicazione sono potenzialmente illimitati: dal sistema pensionistico allo smaltimento dei rifiuti, dalla lotta all'obesità al traffico, dalla donazione di organi ai mercati finanziari, non c'è praticamente settore della vita pubblica o privata che non possa trarre giovamento dal "paternalismo libertario".

An updated and refreshed edition of the groundbreaking book that shows how people can be nudged toward decisions that will improve their lives "If you've read Nudge and think you fully grasp the concept and its uses, you are mistaken. The new edition significantly deepened my understanding of what nudges are and how they can be employed. It truly is a must-read."―Robert Cialdini, New York Times bestselling author of Influence "Few books can be said to have changed the world, but Nudge did. The Final Edition is marvelous: funny, useful, and wise."―Daniel Kahneman, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow Since the original publication of Nudge more than a decade ago, the word "nudge" has entered the vocabulary of businesspeople, policymakers, engaged citizens, and consumers everywhere. The book has given rise to more than 200 "nudge units" in governments around the world and countless groups of behavioral scientists in every part of the economy. It has taught us how to use thoughtful "choice architecture"--a concept the authors invented--to help us make better decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society. Now, the authors have rewritten the book from cover to cover, making use of their experiences in and out of government over the past dozen years as well as the explosion of new research in numerous academic disciplines. It offers a wealth of new insights, for both its avowed fans and newcomers to the field, about a wide variety of issues that we face in our daily lives--COVID-19, health, personal finance, retirement savings, credit card debt, home mortgages, medical care, organ donation, climate change, and "sludge" (paperwork and other nuisances that we don't want and keep us from getting what we do want)--all while honoring one of the cardinal rules of nudging: make it fun!

Adfærdsøkonomi er en stærkt underholdende, anekdotisk beretning om, hvordan en ny videnskab udviklede sig i krydsfeltet mellem økonomi og psykologi. Adfærdsøkonomien forsøger at give svar på, hvorfor mennesker stort set aldrig opfører sig sådan som de burde gøre, hvis de nu tænkte sig lidt om. Bogen sætter et spejl op for sin læser, som får et overraskende indblik i sin egen tænkning.

El libro que inspiró a Barack Obama los fundamentos de la política al demostrar el poder de un pequeño empujón. Por el Premio Nobel de Economía 2017 Richard H. Thaler. En Un pequeño empujón, considerado ya un clásico y uno de los mejores libros sobre economía y política de las últimas décadas, Cass R. Sunstein y Richard H. Thaler, premio Nobel de Economía, observan cómo nuestras percepciones y decisiones dependen del modo en que se organizan ante nosotros las diferentes opciones. Gobiernos y empresas, pero también padres, profesores y médicos, se convierten así en una especie de «arquitectos de la elección». A través de leves impulsos, conscientes, a menudo invisibles y cuyo coste económico y político es irrisorio, las personas e instituciones públicas o privadas pueden incentivar sin mermar la libertad de elección de los ciudadanos, y obtener así grandes logros en relación con la sanidad pública, las finanzas o la lucha contra la desigualdad. Un libro esencial para quienes formulan nuestras políticas públicas, pero cuya aplicabilidad en nuestras vidas cotidianas es sorprendente y maravillosamente eficaz. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION From the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, Richard H. Thaler, and Cass R. Sunstein: a revelatory look at how we make decisions—for fans of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow New York Times bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist and the Financial Times Every day we make choices—about what to buy or eat, about financial investments or our children’s health and education, even about the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. Nudge is about how we make these choices and how we can make better ones. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and drawing on decades of behavioral science research, Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein show that no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way, and that we are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions. But by knowing how people think, we can use sensible “choice architecture” to nudge people toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society, without restricting our freedom of choice.

Argues that economical trends cannot be predicted as much as thought, mainly because humans are so unpredictable, and reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Get ready to change the way you think about economics. Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments. Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber. Laced with antic stories of Thaler’s spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining. Shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Voorlichtingsdeskundige studie over de wijze waarop het grote publiek kan worden gebracht tot het maken van betere en meer verantwoorde keuzes op allerlei gebied.

Has the Nudge Unit Given you a Gentle Push in the Right Direction? Adding just one sentence to a tax reminder brought in millions in extra revenue, Prompting people to become organ donors while paying for their car tax added an extra 100/000 donors to the register, Refocusing the questions asked at the job centre helped an extra 10% of people off benefits and back to work.

A question of increasing interest to researchers in a variety of fields is whether the incentives and experience present in many "real world" settings mitigate judgment and decision-making biases. To investigate this question, we analyze the decision making of National Football League teams during their annual player draft. This is a domain in which incentives are exceedingly high and the opportunities for learning rich. It is also a domain in which multiple psychological factors suggest teams may overvalue the "right to choose" in the draft -- non-regressive predictions, overconfidence, the winner's curse and false consensus all suggest a bias in this direction. Using archival data on draft-day trades, player performance and compensation, we compare the market value of draft picks with the historical value of drafted players. We find that top draft picks are overvalued in a manner that is inconsistent with rational expectations and efficient markets and consistent with psychological research.

Some eleven million 401(k) plan participants take a concentrated equity position in their retirement savings account, investing more than 20% of the balance in their employer's common stock. Yet investing in the stock of one's employer is a risky investment on two counts: single securities are riskier than diversified portfolios (such as mutual funds), and the employee's human capital is typically positively correlated with the performance of the company. In the worst-case scenario, illustrated by the Enron bankruptcy, workers can lose their jobs and much of their retirement wealth simultaneously. For workers who expect to work for the company for many years, a dollar of company stock can be valued at less than 50 cents to the worker after accounting for the risks. But employees still invest voluntarily in their employers' stock, and many employers insist on making matching contributions in stock, despite the fact that a dollar of investment or contribution may be worth only 50 cents on the dollar. How can competitive labor markets sustain a situation in which employers and employees make such a fundamental miscalculation? We provide evidence that employees underestimate the risk of owning company stock, while employers overestimate the benefits associated with employee stock ownership relative to its costs. This evidence provides strong reasons to consider legal reforms in this domain. We make suggestions that would increase employees' freedom of choice and improve their welfare, but without imposing significant costs on well-meaning but ill-informed employers.

We argue that narrow framing, whereby an agent who is offered a new gamble evaluates that gamble in isolation, separately from other risks she already faces, may be a more important feature of decision-making under risk than previously realized. To demonstrate this, we present evidence on typical attitudes to independent monetary gambles with both large and small stakes and show that across a wide range of utility functions, including all expected utility and many non-expected utility specifications, the only ones that can easily capture these attitudes are precisely those exhibiting narrow framing. Our analysis also makes predictions about the kinds of preferences that might be able to address the stock market participation and equity premium puzzles. We illustrate these predictions in simple portfolio choice and equilibrium settings

Standard economics theory is built on the assumption that human beings act rationally in their own self interest. But if rationality is such a reliable factor, why do economic models so often fail to predict market behavior accurately? According to Richard Thaler, the shortcomings of the standard approach arise from its failure to take into account systematic mental biases that color all human judgments and decisions.

A collection of 21 recent articles that illustrate the power of a new approach to finance, one which as editor Thaler puts it, "entertains the possibility that some of the agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." These papers illustrate how specific departures from fully rational decisionmaking by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The equity premium puzzle, first documented by Mehra and Prescott, refers to the empirical fact that stocks have greatly outperformed bonds over the last century. As Mehra and Prescott point out, it appears difficult to explain the magnitude of the equity premium within the usual economics paradigm because the level of risk aversion necessary to justify such a large premium is implausibly large. We offer a new explanation based on Kahneman and Tversky's 'prospect theory'. The explanation has two components. First, investors are assumed to be 'loss averse' meaning they are distinctly more sensitive to losses than to gains. Second, investors are assumed to evaluate their portfolios frequently, even if they have long-term investment goals such as saving for retirement or managing a pension plan. We dub this combination 'myopic loss aversion'. Using simulations we find that the size of the equity premium is consistent with the previously estimated parameters of prospect theory if investors evaluate their portfolios annually. That is, investors appear to choose portfolios as if they were operating with a time horizon of about one year. The same approach is then used to study the size effect. Preliminary results suggest that myopic loss aversion may also have some explanatory power for this anomaly.

This paper examines the proposition that fluctuations in discounts on closed end funds are driven by changes in individual investor sentiment toward closed end funds and other securities. The theory implies that discounts on various funds must move together, that new funds get started when seasoned funds sell at a premium or a small discount, and that discounts on the funds fluctuate together with prices of securities affected by the same investor sentiment. The evidence supports these predictions. In particular, we find that discounts on closed end funds narrow when small stocks do well, as would be expected if closed end funds were subject to the same sentiment as small stocks, whim tern. also to be held by individual investors. The evidence thus suggests that investor sentiment affects security returns.