Daniel Kahneman

Psychology before the economics prize

Kahneman was born during a family visit to Tel Aviv while his parents lived in France. He studied psychology at Hebrew University and earned his Berkeley doctorate in 1961. His disciplinary formation was in psychology rather than a conventional economics doctorate.

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A collaborative account of choice

With Amos Tversky, he investigated judgment and decisions under uncertainty. In his autobiographical account, he describes shifting attention from final wealth to changes relative to a reference point. Their loss-aversion idea distinguished reactions to losses from reactions to comparable gains.

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An academic and a teacher

After appointments at Hebrew University, British Columbia and Berkeley, Kahneman joined Princeton in 1993 and became emeritus in 2007. He taught introductory psychology and developed psychology-for-policy teaching with Eldar Shafir. His institutional contribution included students and courses as well as highly cited experiments.

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Later books and an unfinished empirical programme

Thinking, Fast and Slow appeared in 2011; Noise followed in 2021 with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. Princeton records his death in 2024. The books broadened the readership for questions about judgment, while their titles should not substitute for the underlying studies.

His lecture explains that valuation can depend on a reference point and need not have the same shape for gains and losses. The companion model makes those assumptions visible without claiming to measure a reader's psychology or prescribe a financial decision.

Sources for this section: [3] · [4]