ABSTRACT
When Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness was published in 2008, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein had each worked in academia for three decades. The ideas in Nudge reflected the authors' long-standing interest in applying theories from behavioral economics and psychology to improve human decision-making. In 1998, they collaborated with the American law professor Christine Jolls to describe how behavioral economics could provide more realistic theories of law and government. In 2003, they described how libertarian paternalism could inform government policy-making in an article published in The University of Chicago Law Review. Bringing behavioral economics to global prominence, Nudge represents the culmination of Thaler's life's work. He is the author of many the most important papers in the field and, in the 1980s and 1990s, introduced its ideas to a mainstream economics audience through his column "Anomalies" in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
