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Thaler Wins the Nobel Prize

Richard Thaler, professor of economics at Chicago, won the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics. He is a founder of behavioral economics, which incorporates the psychology of decision-making, challenging the classical views of econ. I've read three of his books, Misbehaving, Nudge, and The Winner's Curse and will probably add book reviews on these shortly. Behavioral econ certainly is more realistic than standard models, but incorporating measures (e.g., irrationality, biases) in econometric models is difficult. Just before I retired, I discovered attempts at doing just that (e.g., indexes that could capture the level of narcissism in CEOs). That would have been useful to add to executive compensation models, but I retired first. I hope to incorporate the general ideas of Thaler and other behaviorists in future books.

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