ABSTRACT
Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein's Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness is grounded in the theories of behavioral economics. This discipline integrates research from psychology into economics with the goal of producing more realistic models of human decision-making. Rational choice theory describes a simplified model of human decision-making in which people behave as "rational actors", with complete information about the choices available to them, perfect cognitive ability, and infinite self-control. Thaler's insight was that "there could be predictable bias". By this he meant that sometimes people could consistently behave in a way that seemed "irrational" by the standards of rational choice theory. He developed this idea from studying the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1970s. During that decade, Kahneman and Tversky produced a series of seminal papers on human decision-making.
