Richard Thaler
American behavioral economist. Winner of the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for incorporating psychologically realistic assumptions into economics.
Key contributions
- Mental accounting — the theory that people categorize money into mental “buckets” (e.g., savings, fun money, found money) and treat dollars in each bucket differently, even though money is fungible. Central to the 2017 Nobel.
- Co-author of Nudge (with Cass Sunstein) on choice architecture.
- Endowment effect work (with Kahneman and Knetsch).
Why he matters here
Mental accounting is the theoretical backbone of Payment decoupling in mobile games: virtual currencies (gems, coins) shift money out of the painful “real money” bucket into a less-monitored mental category, reducing the pain signal when spending.