Valerio Capraro
Today, we have lost one of the greatest contemporary thinkers. Daniel Kahneman shattered the glass palace of science and became famous worldwide in 2011 with the publication of "Thinking, Fast and Slow”, in which he popularized the dual-process theory. This theory suggests that human decisions arise from a complex interplay between two cognitive systems: one more intuitive and the other more deliberative. Despite many critiques and refinements, this theory remains one of the main reference points for scholars studying human decisions. But this was not Kahneman's only contribution. His 1979 paper in Econometrica, introducing prospect theory, is one of the most cited articles in economics and is one of the main reasons he, a psychologist, was able to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. In this paper, Kahneman and Tversky introduce a utility function aimed at explaining how people make decisions under risk. Personally, I found this article to be one of the most inspiring I have ever read. The day I read it, I understood that human behavior could be captured through a mathematical formula. I was a pure mathematician at the time, now I study human decisions. In another article from 1986, Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler introduced an economic game that later became known as the “dictator game”, which has become the official measure of human altruism. The game is very simple: you have 10 dollars and the recipient has nothing. You can give any amount to the receiver, ranging from 0 to 10. The recipient is passive and only gets what you decide to give. How much would you give? But this is not even the tip of the iceberg. Any summary of his work would inevitably be incomplete. I have just gone on his Google Scholar page. His work has more than half a million citations! He reshaped psychology and economics by inventing entirely new fields of research.
