Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

by Richard H. Thaler

* I agreed but with some warnings. I said that a collaboration might be unwise on at least two counts. First, I am notoriously slow. (I didn’t mention the lazy part.) Second, I worried about the “Matthew effect,” a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton, which states that excessive credit for any idea will be attributed to the most well-recognized person who is associated with it. Stephen Stigler, a statistician at the University of Chicago, called his alternative version of this effect Stigler’s Law (irony intended): “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” The joke, of course, is that Stigler’s Law was just a restatement of Merton’s proposition. Thierry and the group decided that we would collaborate, with the proviso that if I did not think I was adding anything, I would withdraw.