«Misbehaving» (2015) is an unusual intellectual autobiography: Richard Thaler narrates the birth and consolidation of behavioural economics as an academic discipline from the inside, as one of its founders.
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Richard Thaler's intellectual autobiography is also the story of behavioral economics as a discipline. He narrates how he built, alongside Kahneman, Tversky, and others, the behavioral economics edifice: prospect theory, mental accounting, endowment effect, present bias — all demonstrating that humans are not the rational agents standard economics assumes.
«Misbehaving» (2015) is an unusual intellectual autobiography: Richard Thaler narrates the birth and consolidation of behavioural economics as an academic discipline from the inside, as one of its founders. The book covers four decades of research, from Thaler's early years at Rochester — when colleagues viewed his questioning of the rational-agent axiom with open scepticism — to the global recognition of behavioural economics as a legitimate field. Along the way, Thaler describes his collaborations with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the formulation of concepts such as mental accounting, the endowment effect, and regression to the mean, and how these findings were gradually absorbed into economic policy. The writing is accessible and wry, with the humour of someone who enjoyed decades of institutional scepticism before vindication. For readers who already know «Nudge» or «Thinking, Fast and Slow», this book adds the backstory: who proposed these ideas, how they were validated, and why orthodox economics resisted them for so long.
For readers who already know the foundations of behavioural economics and want to understand its intellectual history from the perspective of one of its creators.
FactRichard Thaler published «Misbehaving» in 2015; two years later, in 2017, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to behavioural economics.
