Matthew Joel Rabin (born December 27, 1963) is the Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business School. Rabin's research focuses primarily on incorporating psychologically more realistic assumptions into empirically applicable formal economic theory. His topics of interest include errors in statistical reasoning and the evolution of beliefs, effects of choice context on exhibited preferences, reference-dependent preferences, and errors people make in inference in market and learning settings.

Background

Rabin was the Edward G. and Nancy S. Jordan Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley Economics Department for 25 years before moving to Harvard. He received a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four year ...

Economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes ...

and Mathematics from

University of Wisconsin–Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...

in 1984 and PhD in

from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

in 1989. Before entering MIT, he was a research student at the

London School of Economics The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a public university, public research university located in London, England and a constituent college of the federal University of London. Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidn ...

. He is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable and co-organizer of the Russell Sage Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics. Rabin has also been a visiting professor at M.I.T., London School of Economics, Northwestern, Harvard, and Caltech, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Russell Sage Foundation. His research is directed, among other economic fields, towards

behavioral finance Behavioral economics studies the effects of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the decisions of individuals or institutions, such as how those decisions vary from those implied by classical economic theory. ...

and behavioral economics. Rabin works on the economics of individual self-control problems, reference-dependent preferences, fairness motives and mistakes in probabilistic reasoning. He developed Rabin fairness as a model to account for fairness in social preferences. In 2001 he was awarded the

John Bates Clark Medal The John Bates Clark Medal is awarded by the American Economic Association to "that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge." The award is named after the ...

by the American Economic Association and also the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. In 2006 he was awarded the

John von Neumann Award The John von Neumann Award ( hu, Neumann János-díj), named after John von Neumann, is given annually by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies in Budapest, to an outstanding scholar in the exact social sciences, whose works have had su ...

by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies.

References

External links

Psychology and Economics
An essay by Matthew Rabin
In Honor of Matthew Rabin: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Rabin, Matthew 1963 births Living people MacArthur Fellows Behavioral economists Fellows of the Econometric Society University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty Harvard Business School faculty 20th-century American economists 21st-century American economists