Richard H. Thaler is a professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017. The following year, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has written several books, including Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, and published nearly 100 papers in his field. He is an important figure in the history of behavioral economics and has worked with pioneers in the field of cognitive bias like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Nudge is easily his most popular book.

In 1974, Thaler completed his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester where he was soon awarded a professorship. He then moved to Stanford (where he worked with Kahneman and Tversky, followed by a long tenure at Cornell. In 1995 he received his position at the University of Chicago where he remains. Thaler wrote a regular column called Anomalies for the academic journal, Economic Perspectives, in which he presented analyses of unexpected economic behavior. Though Thaler is widely respected, his views are not uncontroversial, and economists seem to have a more mixed view of nudge theory than legal philosophers or politicians.