Law & Economics
Portrait of Daniel Kahneman
Scholar portraitSource: Nobel Prize

Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman

Psychologist and behavioral economist of judgment and decision-making

behavioral economicsprospect theoryjudgment and decision-making

Official Source Note

Nobel Prize materials identify Kahneman as the 2002 economics laureate for integrating insights from psychological research into economics, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.

Kahneman is included as a behavioral foundation for law-and-economics analysis rather than as a doctrinal legal scholar: his work with Amos Tversky supplies the vocabulary of heuristics, biases, reference dependence, loss aversion, and prospect theory.

Source: Nobel Prize

Relevance to the Archive

For legal analysis, Kahneman helps explain why actors may respond to legal rules through framing, reference points, salience, overconfidence, or loss aversion rather than through fully rational optimization.

Representative Contributions

  • Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974)
  • Prospect Theory (with Amos Tversky, 1979)
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

Works Included Here