Sendhil Mullainathan – författare

Sendhil Mullainathan, the 'most interesting young economist in the world', and Eldar Shafir, the 'most brilliant psychologist' of his generation, explain the hidden problem behind everything with ScarcityWhy can we never seem to keep on top of our workload, social diary or chores? Why does poverty persist around the world? Why do successful people do things at the last minute in a sudden rush of energy? Here, economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir reveal that the hidden side behind all these problems is that they're all about scarcity. Using the new science of scarcity, they explain why obesity is rampant; why people find it difficult to sleep when most sleep deprived; and why the lonely find it so hard to make friends. Scarcity will change the way you think about both the little everyday tasks and the big issues of global urgency.'Stars in their respective disciplines, and the combination is greater than the sum of its parts. Their project has a unique feel to it: it is the finest combination of heart and head that I have seen in our field' - Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow'Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live' - Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics'An ultimately humane and very welcome book' - Oliver Burkeman, Guardian Sendhil Mullainathan is a Professor of Economics at Harvard, and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant". He conducts research on development economics, behavioural economics, and corporate finance. He is Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University.Eldar Shafir is William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Most of his work focuses on descriptive analyses of inference, judgment, and decision making, and on issues related to behavioural economics.

Traditional public finance provides a powerful framework for policy analysis, but it relies on a model of human behavior that the new science of behavioral economics increasingly calls into question. In Policy and Choice economists William Congdon, Jeffrey Kling, and Sendhil Mullainathan argue that public finance not only can incorporate many lessons of behavioral economics but also can serve as a solid foundation from which to apply insights from psychology to questions of economic policy.The authors revisit the core questions of public finance, armed with a richer perspective on human behavior. They do not merely apply findings from psychology to specific economic problems; instead, they explore how psychological factors actually reshape core concepts in public finance such as moral hazard, deadweight loss, and incentives.Part one sets the stage for integrating behavioral economics into public finance by interpreting the evidence from psychology and developing a framework for applying it to questions in public finance. In part two, the authors apply that framework to specific topics in public finance, including social insurance, externalities and public goods, income support and redistribution, and taxation.In doing so, the authors build a unified analytical approach that encompasses both traditional policy levers, such as taxes and subsidies, and more psychologically informed instruments. The net result of this innovative approach is a fully behavioral public finance, an integration of psychology and the economics of the public sector that is explicit, systematic, rigorous, and realistic.