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My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

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Welcome to a special more or less podcast.

I'm Charlotte McDonald and we're going to be talking today about the winner of this year's

Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, Richard Thaler. Now all we need is an economist with us who could

tell us about him?

Charlotte, I'm an economist.

Really, you kept that undercover.

Do you know about... Do you know about Thaler? I do know about Thaler. I've interviewed

him, I've met him, I've read his books, I've written about him about 25 times, so yeah, he's an

amazing economist and I'm happy to talk about him.

All right, well that's good enough for us. So well, tell us who is he? Who is this person?

He's a professor at the University of Chicago and he is, I suppose, the leading behavioral economist in the world.

And behavioral economics is this, it's really an attempt to introduce a sort of psychological realism into economics.

Classical economics has these quite formal, perhaps unrealistic assumptions about how humans behave.

And the behavioral economists say, well, we could add psychology,

or maybe just add a bit of common sense.

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