In Honor of Matthew Rabin: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

Abstract

Matthew Rabin's Clark medal honors his abilities to digest huge amounts of nuanced psychology, create simple models capturing that psychology, and do behavioral economics with those models. After warming up by solving hard problems in modeling pre-game communication, his behavioral career began with a seminal paper on reciprocity. He also created models of “present-bias” in time discounting, and derived some surprises from them, and implications (e.g., deadlinesetting and sin taxes). Matthew has also studied quasi-Bayesian models of judgment biases (confirmation and overgeneralization from small samples), overprojection of current feelings into the future, and how moral rules differ from moral tastes.