Matthew Rabin

Matthew Rabin is the Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business School.

Before that, he spent 25 years at the wonderful University of California, Berkeley Economics Department.  His research focuses primarily on incorporating psychologically more realistic assumptions into empirically applicable formal economic theory. His current 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. He received his PhD from MIT in 1989, the same year he joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor. He is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable and co-organizer of the Russell Sage Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics. He has been a visiting professor at M.I.T., London School of Economics, Northwestern, Harvard, and Cal Tech, as well as a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (at Stanford) and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Professor Rabin's honors include Most Likely to Express His Opinion (Springbrook High School); Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow; Graduate Economics Association Outstanding Teaching Award; MacArthur Foundation Fellow; Econometric Society Fellow; John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association; and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.