The Winner's Curse

It’s fun and nerdy in the best way, and I have no hesitation at recommending it – Tim Harford, Financial Times Best Books of 2025Thaler and Imas gleefully trash numerous central dogmas of modern-day economics and instead foreground how knee-jerk intuitions, fuzzy rules of thumb, and social pressure rule human decision-making. It’s a sophisticated discussion, complete with a few equations, but lay readers will enjoy the lucid prose and down-home conclusions. The result is an enlightening analysis of economic choice as a stubbornly flawed and human endeavor * Publisher’s Weekly *part of the canon of behavioral economics – Greg Rosalsky * Planet Money, NPR *contains a wealth of empirical evidence to describe how people deviate from the ideal theory presented in a narrative that is easily accessible to non-economists – Matthew Lucky * Promarket *This is everywhere now. It’s in the meme stocks, the retail traders, sports betting, online casinos – Alice Fulwood * Economist *Shines a light on our cognitive biases … and applies it to something that impacts all of our lives - markets, businesses, the way we conduct our own households – Nick Kokonas, co-author of “Life, On the Line”Revisits decades of behavioral insights that changed how we think about choice, cooperation and human nature itself – Guy Kawasaki * Remarkable People *

Richard H. Thaler

Richard H. Thaler received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He is a distinguished service professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is the New York Times bestselling coauthor of Nudge—Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Cass Sunstein) and the author of Misbehaving—The Making of Behavioral Economics.

Alex O. Imas

Alex O. Imas is Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is the recipient of the 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Review of Financial Studies Rising Scholar Award, the New Investigator Award from the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award from the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics at Carnegie Mellon University.