Richard Thaler.... Padre de Behavioral Economics

Thaler, profesor en Chicago es uno de los padres de los que se conoce ahora como Behavioral Economics o Economía del Comportamiento. Esta es una excelente entrevista sobre su vida y su contribución...

Profile: Richard Thaler, University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor

Economic theory long held that consumers behave like smart robots, always making rational and logical decisions. But as Thaler began observing more than 30 years ago, that's not what happens in real life. Instead, humans make irrational decisions in systematically warped ways, time and again, for the same reasonsHis insertion of human psychology into the hard-core mathematical field of economics was once so heretical that Thaler couldn't even get his ideas published. Thaler is famous for devising easily understood scenarios that show how human behavior bucks economics and, sometimes, logic. Consider: •Why, during a hazardous snowstorm, would we skip driving to a concert if the tickets were free, but risk life and limb to go if we had paid for the tickets? The risk on the roads is the same, and we don't get the money back either way. This illustrates the "sunk cost fallacy." •Experiments repeatedly show that people are willing to pay $3 to buy a coffee mug but demand $6 to sell a mug they have been given. The phenomenon is called the "endowment effect," where we assign greater value to things we possess. •You bring $200 to a casino to gamble. You win another $200. If you separate the money and lose only the winnings, you may not feel much pain because you consider that money to be the casino's anyway. Yet you still lost $200. This is a good example of "mental accounting."