Richard H. Thaler (@r_thaler) is the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is also a founding principal at FullerThaler Asset Management, which uses behavioral finance to manage over $30 billion in small-cap US equities. 

Thaler has been a professional disrupter. He helped create the fields of behavioral economics and finance that lie in the gap between economics and psychology. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. 

Thaler is the New York Times bestselling coauthor of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Cass R. Sunstein) and the author of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. His new book is The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now, co-authored with economist Alex O. Imas. 

My co-host is Nick Kokonas (@nickkokonas), an entrepreneur, investor, and author best known as the co-founder of The Alinea Group (sold, 2024) and the reservation platform Tock (now owned by American Express). After revolutionizing how restaurants and experiences are crafted, booked, and managed, he’s now focused on creative ventures that blend business, technology, and art—from immersive theater projects to Napa Valley winemaking. A philosophy graduate of Colgate University, he is as interested in ideas and first principles as he is in building things that last. He lives in Chicago and Napa Valley with his wife and two sons.

Please enjoy!

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SHOW NOTES & LINKS

Transcripts

SHOW NOTES

Books and Articles:

Additional Resources:

• Richard H. Thaler — X Profile 
• Richard H. Thaler — Chicago Booth Profile
• Interview with Richard H. Thaler — NobelPrize.org
• Read These Five Papers to Understand Thaler’s Nobel-Winning Work (Bloomberg)
• The Making of Richard Thaler’s Economics Nobel (The New Yorker)
• Richard Thaler Wins the Nobel in Economics for Killing Homo Economicus (The Atlantic)
• Nick Kokonas — Wikipedia
• Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Life (#341) — The Tim Ferriss Show
• Nick Kokonas on Resurrecting Restaurants, Skin in the Game, and Investing (#429) — The Tim Ferriss Show
• Tock — Official Site
• The Alinea Group
• Alex Imas — Chicago Booth Profile
• Daniel Kahneman
• Amos Tversky
• Prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979)
• Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974)
• Availability Heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973)
• Endowment Effect & Coase Theorem (Kahneman, Knetsch & Thaler, 1990)
• Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking (Kahneman, Knetsch & Thaler, 1986)
• Save More Tomorrow™ (Thaler & Benartzi, 2004)
• Default Effects in 401(k)s (Madrian & Shea, 2001)
• Choice Architecture (Thaler, Sunstein & Balz, 2013)
• Schiphol’s “Fly in the Urinal” Nudge
• Sunk Cost Fallacy (Arkes & Blumer, 1985)
• Gambling with the House Money and Trying to Break Even (Thaler & Johnson, 1990)
• Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting (Laibson, 1997)
• The CFO Survey (Duke/Fuqua)
• Libertarian Paternalism (Thaler & Sunstein, 2003)
• Journal of Economic Perspectives (open access)
• Anomalies: The Winner’s Curse (Thaler, JEP)
• Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science (Open Science Collaboration, 2015)
• Evaluating Replicability of Laboratory Experiments in Economics (Camerer et al., 2016)
• Temptation Bundling (Milkman, Minson & Volpp, 2014)
• Paying Not to Go to the Gym (DellaVigna & Malmendier, 2006)

Note from the editor: An expanded list of links & resources will be added.

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