Nobel Prize for Economics winner to address annual Porto Business School conference

Richard H. Thaler, one of the first researchers to link Economics and Psychology to try and understand how human behaviour, at times, deviates from economic theory models — for which he won the Noble Prize for Economics in 2017 – is one of the guest speakers at the Porto Business School – The Vertex – annual conference which runs on the 17 and 18 of September at the Porto congress centre ‘Centro de Congressos da Alfândega’. 

A Professor at Chicago University, Thaler was distinguished by the Academy of Sciences in Sweden for understanding the “Psychology of Economics.” Thaler has dedicated his career to studying economic and financial psychology, challenging classic economic theory which suggests that people are rational and take rational and well thought out decisions.

Thaler, is one of those behind the creation of the concept of Behavioural Economics, which argues that “economic agents are human and economic models should take this into consideration,” explaining that the key economic drivers are humans beings, liable to making mistakes and taking irrational decisions which, at times, don’t make sense from a purely economic standpoint.