Richard Thaler

If you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy.

The premise of behavioral economics is that people are human.

People are not always rational, and that's okay.

To do good economics, you have to get your hands dirty.

The world is full of nudges, whether we like it or not.

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.

Choice architects have an enormous responsibility.

The most effective nudges are those that are barely noticed.

Libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron.

People often make choices that do not promote their long-term welfare.

The goal of behavioral economics is to improve the human condition.

Standard economic theory assumes that people are rational, self-interested, and have stable preferences. Behavioral economics challenges these assumptions.

Loss aversion is one of the most powerful forces in human behavior.

The endowment effect means that we value things more once we own them.

Mental accounting describes the way people categorize and evaluate financial decisions.

Sunk costs are costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Rational people ignore them, but humans often don't.

The hot hand fallacy is the belief that a person who has experienced success has a greater chance of further success in subsequent attempts.

People are often overconfident in their abilities.

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.

Anchoring is a cognitive bias where an individual's decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or 'anchor'.