Stephen A. Ross of MIT, another finance theorist who was a likely future Nobel laureate until he died unexpectedly in March, argued along similar lines. In his 2005 book Neoclassical Finance, he, too, eschewed psychology, preferring to build a “methodology of finance as the implication of the absence of arbitrage.” In other words, we can learn a lot about people’s behavior just from the observation that there are no ten-dollar bills lying around on public sidewalks. However psychologically bent some people are, one can bet that they will pick up the money as soon as they spot it.
Both Miller and Ross made wonderful contributions to financial theory. But their results are not the only descriptions of economic and financial forces that should interest us, and Thaler has been a major contributor to a behavioral research program that has demonstrated this.
For example, in 1981, Thaler and Santa Clara University’s Hersh Shefrin advanced an “economic theory of self-control” that describes economic phenomena in terms of people’s inability to control their impulses. Sure, people have no trouble motivating themselves to pick up a ten-dollar bill that they might find on a sidewalk. There is no self-control issue there. But they will have trouble resisting the impulse to spend it. As a result, most people save too little for their retirement years.
Economists need to know about such mistakes that people repeatedly make. During a long subsequent career, involving work with UCLA’s Shlomo Benartzi and others, Thaler has proposed mechanisms that will, as he and Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein put it in their book Nudge, change the “choice architecture” of these decisions. The same people, with the same self-control problems, could be enabled to make better decisions.
Improving people’s saving behavior is not a small or insignificant matter. To some extent, it is a matter of life or death, and, more pervasively, it determines whether we achieve fulfillment and satisfaction in life.